Christoffer Sigshøj Podcast Transcript
Christoffer Sigshøj joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Christopher Sigshøj. Christopher Sigshøj has a diverse professional background spanning various companies and roles. As a co-founder of KiteX.Tech, Christopher focuses on the mechanical and design aspects of super lightweight mobile wind turbines. His pivotal role at KiteX Tech involved developing an efficient and easily installable tethered wind turbine design, surpassing the capabilities of traditional turbines.
Before KiteX.Tech, Christopher was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Canary until 2021.
Well, good afternoon, Chris. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:50] Christoffer Sigshøj: Thanks.
[00:00:51] Brian Thomas: Awesome, Chris. I appreciate you jumping on a podcast with me again. It’s early in the morning here, but you’re hailing out of the great country of Denmark. Love to traverse the world doing these podcasts. So again, welcome.
[00:01:04] Christoffer Sigshøj: Thanks, Brian.
[00:01:05] Brian Thomas: You bet. Chris let’s jump right into the questions here. I want to get your story out there. You’ve got quite the career as an engineer, a serial entrepreneur, CTO, and now the co-founder of KiteX.Tech. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:24] Christoffer Sigshøj: I don’t know if there’s a particularly a secret to it, I think I have just been one of the people you can call it lucky or, yeah, I don’t know, fortunate enough to find sort of things that have really interested me and then had the educational background to pursue those adventures, I would say.
It’s when your hobbies meets your career, then it just gets so motivating. And Yeah, fun to work with, with the stuff here at what we are doing at KiteX so that’s my inspiration is is in kite surfing. I’m a kite surfer and then it’s what can you say?
You can call it. It’s a, it’s the thing you’re thinking a lot about wind power. And I’ve always been fond of renewable energy and just sustainability in general. The inspiration really comes from my childhood growing up with a sustainable parents building their own house from recycled materials.
And then to go into engineering school and thinking about, how can we, you are getting a little bit trained and how to make things more efficient, but also the green movement that we have at the moment. How can we make the world a better place with greener power? So that’s my mission inspiration, I would say.
[00:02:28] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And I know you like to really. As an engineer, dive into some of these things to understand how things work. And really you have a purpose. How do we make the world better? And so that drives you forward and love some of the stuff that you’re doing as far as innovation.
So, thank you. Chris is currently turning the costly traditional wind turbine on its head with your lightweight and mobile design. What made you design something more innovative?
[00:02:55] Christoffer Sigshøj: So, the inspiration really comes from kite surfing. I don’t know if you have seen kite surfing before, Brian, if you’ve tried it?
[00:03:01] Brian Thomas: Yeah, I’ve seen it a lot. I’ve not tried it.
[00:03:03] Christoffer Sigshøj: Yeah, so you’re seeing these kites up in the air, flying about in the water. And what enables this is the lines basically. So you have these, they’re called the Dyneema lines and they’re made from a plastic fiber, actually, but this fiber is eight times stronger than steel.
So it’s just amazing that people can fly around in the air. And it was similar. What KiteX initially set out to do the first thing. KiteX was doing was making flying wind turbines, and that proved to be a little bit too hard for us. It’s a very tricky problem to have something up there in the air, flying around in all the edge cases, landing, taking off all of this stuff.
And so, we said, what can we do with our technology or the knowledge that we have? We are really good at building lightweight structures. The lines here, that is the key to our technology. So, we anchor the forces from the wind turbine in the ground. So, we’re just using earth you can say ground itself as the anchoring.
We we take some big screws to steel screws that you drive into the ground and then you put a line on that. And then we have guidelines like you have in a tent or whatever. And then we have built the rotor also around the line. So, the rotor is suspended by these ultra strong and Lightweight lines, which are all the forces are held by. So that means that we are saving around 90 percent of the materials compared to a traditional wind turbine, where you need concrete foundation, big steel tower. And yeah, that’s inspiration for it. And just one more thing.
I don’t know if you have gone to our website. It’s KiteX.Tech. You can see how it looks. It looks also a little bit odd, our turbine compared to traditional ones, as we have taking the tip of a rotor blade, and we’re only using the tip of the rotor blade. And then we just have lines in the middle there.
And that’s because a normal traditional turbine that makes 80 percent of the energy is made by the last 20 percent of the tip. I really like this 80, 20 rule. It just pops up everywhere in life, it seems, but it’s really, it’s similar with turbine. So, the blades for traditional wind turbine, all the route, like down at the at the top of the tower, that’s just there to support the tip of the blade.
So if we can, avoid all of that material cost and use guidelines into the ground. We can avoid all the concrete and all of this. Then we can make the the turbines 90 percent lighter. And that also means they’re cheaper and much more greener. I mean, wind turbines are already a super clean green technology, but we can make it even cleaner with our technology. Yeah, that’s really really nice. I think.
[00:05:28] Brian Thomas: Yeah, no, that’s awesome. And I appreciate that you’re. Using again, being innovative, turning this whole industry upside down which is awesome, right? Because we know the current large wind turbines, like you said, take a lot of concrete, they’re expensive, they obviously can kill wildlife birds, et cetera.
What we like about your platform is Its innovation. I did go to your website. It’s pretty cool to see how efficient your materials are and how this works. So that’s awesome. Thank you again. I appreciate diving into that for our audience Chris, can you briefly walk through the development process of going from flying wind turbines to super lightweight ones?
[00:06:06] Christoffer Sigshøj: Yeah, sure. So the thing is, we actually had a flying wind turbine prototype, but needed more funding to pursue it. And Google, they also had a big project like this. They shut it down. We needed more funding. Okay. The space was not that great at that time. So, we transitioned and said, Oh, can we do a lightweight structure that actually has a purpose in life?
And this is where our wind catcher comes in at the moment. So, we are targeting campers, people living really remote or setting up a camp for a week or two or people generally, it’s a portable lightweight structure at the moment. And that’s sort of the initial market.
We said, what is the turbine that we can make that is impactful, but still is small enough for us to be able to make it in a time span that was not. 20 years, right? Because that’s not really the, I don’t think we could have found anybody who wanted to support us in 20 years, just developing turbine.
So we started small, just like the traditional big turbines. And we are 50 years behind the traditional ones. But we are, I would say we are catching up and our next step is to make it a little bit larger so we can supply a household, now everybody needs a electric cars and heat pumps.
This is a, this is how we transition away from fossil fuels as a society in general. And that’s the next size turbine, I would say.
[00:07:22] Brian Thomas: Awesome. Thank you. I appreciate that. And again, KiteX.Tech is the website to go to see all this stuff, which is awesome. And I’ve checked it out. Chris, last question of the day.
We are a technology platform and publication podcast. So we like to get into a little bit of tech and I know you talked about tech from a mechanical standpoint, but you’re obviously leveraging some of this newer and emerging technologies in your tech stack. Is there anything you might be able to share with us today?
[00:07:50] Christoffer Sigshøj: Yeah, sure. Often, I would say that we are replacing steel and concrete with the control system software. Right. And sensors and stuff like this. So I often like to say that our turbine technology is this Yeah. Kind of say unholy trinity between a drone and a wind turbine and a 3D printer.
We are using technology. We’re using 3D printing technology for manufacturing first of all, but a lot of the technology that are from these, you’re seeing these fields. We are applying those to the turbine. So, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes in custom hardware. That is, of course, running custom software on them.
So, the tech stack is, I would say, one thing is the mechanical thing. The other thing is running a control loop at 200 Hertz and collecting acceleration data and and talks and all of this from the generator. So, there’s a lot going on behind it. Yeah,
[00:08:38] Brian Thomas: Yeah, no, that’s great. I appreciate you sharing that. That’s awesome. And we have a broad range in our audience of different backgrounds, and we just love to hear just about everything around tech, whether again, mechanical or information technology. So I appreciate the share Chris, it was a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:08:59] Christoffer Sigshøj: Thanks, Brian. Thanks for that.
[00:09:01] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Christoffer Sigshøj Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
