6 HN users recommended this documentary5 months2020–2025score 6.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN recommends it as a technically rich, beautifully made documentary on ambitious hardware engineering and failure.
A feature-length film by the Makani team chronicling their thirteen-year effort to build energy kites that harvest wind power, with footage from test sites in Hawaii, California and Norway. It shows the engineering, the team and the eventual shutdown.
“There's a beautiful feature film about the story of Makani. It's a great watch with plenty of technical details” (HN, 2025)
Makani (Acquired by Google and shut down) built large airplane/kites which transmitted wind power to the ground via a tether. The engineering challenges were... intense. This was all documented extensively and this documentary summarizes all the footage they took: [this video] One of my favorite engineering projects and documentaries, just because of the sheer ambition and scale, and the grit of the team to keep pushing through repeated failures. Sad the project was cancelled but it makes sense given the cost and complexity.
Documents Makani's ambition and repeated failures with extensive footage
There's a beautiful feature film about the story of Makani. It's a great watch with plenty of technical details that follows the story from beginning to end. Available for free on YouTube: [this video]
Beautiful full-story film with plenty of technical detail
Reminds me of the incredible engineering done by Makani, as told in this 2 hours long autodocumentary [1]. They shut down in 2020 because they didn't see a path towards commercializing their airborne wind turbine. They made a non-assertion pledge on their patents, and open sourced much of their code (simulations, firmware) [2]. [1] [this video] [2] [link]
Two-hour autodocumentary of Makani's engineering and shutdown
I think the Makani documentary does a good job explaining the problem in less than 2 min [1]. [1] [this video] Regarding the size x quantity, I believe the reason lies in where the best wind is, which is usually high above the ground. The roughness of the terrain and obstacles generate shear and turbulence, which translates into more stress for the components. The higher wind has a more uniform distribution across the rotor and is higher in magnitude than in lower heights. So for small wind turbines to have access to the best wind, you would have to build expensive structures to reach there, making it infeasible. Hence kite approaches like the one posted and Makani (with different principles).
Explains the airborne wind problem in under two minutes
In the film they explain that since wind turbines extract power based on the area they sweep, their kite would be able to sweep a bigger area more easily. (No need for so much material, no need for a 150m tall tower, etc.) [this video]
Explains why kite turbines sweep larger areas with less material
I'd say it's very different with X. I looked at the large number of hardware design docs that were open-sourced[1] when they shut down Makani - hell, even the Makani documentary[2] was mostly about hardware (material science, mechanics, aerodynamics) with a some software sprinkled in. 1. [link] 2. [this video]
Documentary focuses on hardware engineering of Makani
Not to be a HN naysayer, but wasn't this tried already with Makani Power?[1] They even made a documentary about it[2] Compared to traditional wind turbines, this solution trades an enormous amount of complexity, maintenance, etc for small reductions in material cost. We should be churning out traditional wind turbines for cheap instead. [1] [link] [2] [this video]
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![Frame from Pulling Power from the Sky: The Story of Makani [Feature Film]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qd_hEja6bzE/hq2.jpg)
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