Ampyx Power

Ampyx Power, founded in The Hague in 2008, set out to make airborne wind energy work at the scale of power stations. Instead of a kite, it flew a tethered aircraft: a glider that flies loops on a cable, pulls the cable from a drum on the ground and generates electricity, then flies back to start again. In 2012 its first prototype showed fully autonomous power production.

Ampyx built its systems to aviation standards. Its AP-3 prototype, developed with energy company E.ON, was among the first pre-commercial airborne wind demonstrators in the world, with a design for reliability and full autonomy, including automatic detection of and recovery from failures. The planned commercial AP-4 was to deliver 3 megawatts and aimed at repowering old offshore wind sites and, later, floating wind farms at sea.

Ampyx Power joined NEON to help define the place airborne wind might have in a sustainable society. Together with its "friendly competitor" Kitepower, it co-financed four PhD researchers in the airborne wind group of TU Delft. One of them, Helena Schmidt, studied the social side: how people perceive and accept this new kind of wind energy, a question that, as far as the NEON team knew in 2019, nobody had researched.

Ampyx Power was declared bankrupt in May 2022, during NEON. The research it co-financed continued at TU Delft.