Airborne Wind Farms - the world's cheapest source of energy?

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Airborne wind farms offer the potential of providing cheaper (around 2c per kW) electricity, and eliminate the need to clutter up the countryside with turbines to generate electricity from wind. The wind blows more consistently at higher altitudes (> 1,000 m), potentially eliminating the need for backup alternatives, and the amount of wind energy that is available is 50 to 100 times more than is available at ground level.

Numerous wind turbine sets could be stacked on top of each other to minimise the number of connecting cables landing at ground level. According to skywindpower.com, the theoretical wind energy generated by a single column of airspace only 1 m wide between ground and 9,000 metres altitude in the San Diego area would be some 30 GW/h per annum, assuming a 30% capture efficiency.

Lots more at : www.skywindpower.com

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dragonkin

There is a good discussion of the pros and cosn of this here

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Someone else working on it - with Google funding...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/29/BUG5U2VAE.DTL&hw=Faces+of+Business&sn=001&sc=1000

www.makanipower.com

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SeanW

Hate to point out the bleedin' obvious, but how are you supposed to keep the thing in the air?

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SeanW wrote: »

Hate to point out the bleedin' obvious, but how are you supposed to keep the thing in the air?

How do you fly a kite? :-)

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abakan

probe wrote: »

How do you fly a kite? :-)

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with string!!!!

Lennoxschips

there'll be fellas on the ground pulling on the strings

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If someone walked into your office looking for $10M venture capital funding for this type of project in the morning, I suspect you’d arrange for some due diligence on the venture’s ability to keep flying.

Saul doesn’t look like a dumb con merchant seeking a quick buck to buy a Bugatti and an 800 M2 Pacific Ocean villa for himself either, so he can keep surfing. It wouldn’t do much for his reputation, and the $10 million wouldn’t last very long.

There is an interesting chart on the dependability of wind – v – altitude : http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/makani.pdf

The cynic might think that this is a PR stunt by Google to mitigate the impact of the energy demand of the “world’s largest supercomputer” which runs their core business.

However they haven’t gone for a lot of publicity and it would make them look extremely stupid in a few years time, if the project failed on such an obvious, basic concept that some aeronautical expert could have told them for a $1000 fee or less today. The impact on the Google share price, EMC, and management reputation would be infinitely greater.

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pirelli

It was a very interesting Article Prob. It should be **** easy to make these things. It is probably damn hard to figure how to fly them but providing the right material is cheap and available then they should be in production.