Alphabet/Google calls it quits with Makani wind project

Alphabet, Google’s parent body, announced that it is shutting down the Makani project.

Makani was founded in 2006 by a group of kitesurfers who were curious about the potential for kites to unlock wind energy in more places around the globe. Google acquired the startup in 2013, placing the group inside its X lab with other “moonshots” like self-driving cars. Makani later became its own Alphabet unit.

According to Fort Felker, CEO of Makani, in a blog post yesterday, “Creating an entirely new kind of wind energy technology means facing business challenges as well as engineering challenges. Despite strong technical progress, the road to commercialization is longer and riskier than hoped, so from today Makani’s time at Alphabet is coming to an end”

“This doesn’t mean the end of the road for the technology Makani developed, but it does mean that Makani will no longer be an Alphabet company. Shell is exploring options to continue developing Makani’s technology.” he adds.

In the same vein, Google also announced that it is shutting down Google Station globally this year because it was becoming hard to scale up and to make a sustainable business