SkySails

SkySails Group GmbH is a Hamburg-based company that sells kite rigs to propel cargo ships, large yachts and fishing vessels by wind energy as well as airborne wind energy systems for electricity production from high-altitude winds. SkySails Group GmbH is a successor company to SkySails GmbH, which was founded in 2001 by Stephan Wrage and Thomas Meyer in Hamburg. The company, while technically successful at cutting shipping costs and carbon emissions, has faced economic difficulties."There's a structural problem slowing down the process: ship owners (who have to make the investment) often don't pay for the fuel – that's the charterer's duty. The charterer on the other side doesn't charter the ship for long enough a period to make low-carbon technologies pay back." — Henning Kuehl, head of business development at SkySails"Fuel costs mostly get passed onto the shipper so we see little use in installing potentially expensive, untested technology to which we see no other benefit. Basically I am interested but will not be the first to try it on a large scale."— Anonymous ship owner The lack of carbon emissions regulations for shipping and low fuel prices have added to these difficulties. In the weak economy of 2012, a time of low investment by shipping companies, the company laid off half of its 80 employees. On March 7, 2016, SkySails GmbH, as part of the SkySails Group, was forced to file for insolvency and was dissolved on April 5, 2016. Since then, SkySails Group GmbH, as the successor company, has continued business operations and has developed a further business area in the form of the SkySails Power division. The company's headquarters are in Hamburg. The assembly of ground stations of the airborne wind energy systems takes place in Lower-Saxony. The SkySails propulsion system consists of an automatically controlled foil kite of some hundreds of square meters, an electronic control system for the kite, and an automatic system to retract the kite. The ram-air kite, while 1-2 orders of magnitude larger, bears similarities to the arc kites used in kitesurfing.