Energy from High-Altitude Kites

maddmike writes "High altitude kites could produce energy equal to some power stations at a comparable cost without polluting. The technique uses a thing dubbed a 'Laddermill' - a chain of kites attached together to create a loop in the sky more than 5 miles long."

Article skimpy on details ( as usual )

[goofyheadedpunk]

The article doesn't say much about how such a structure could be maintained. How in the world could kites stay up for a long enough period to be feasible as a power source? Or is all this still in the "just five more years" phase?

I'd like learn more, but the article is not very helpful.

"Equal to some power stations"?

[nwbvt]

What power stations are these? According to the article, a city like Seattle would require on the scale of a hundred thousand of these kites (or hundreds of plants with 400 kites each) to supply the city with electricity. And when you consider the limits to where these could be place (airspaces are out, along with any place where something could be damaged should one of these guys go down), this isn't a very feasible way to replace our current power system.

What they were saying was equal was the cost, not the total output per kite.

Re:Hey Ben...

[geekoid]

we would point to the kites and say:
"You know what that is? It's Patent infringment, thats what that is!"

More trouble than its worth

[confusion]

I'm really picturing this being quite the Rube Goldberg contraption. Maintaining such a system of giant kites in such strong winds is going to be a problem, as is lightning, storms, etc.

The nice thing about some of the other alternative power systems is that they tend to be smaller scale and are backed up by the power grid or some other form of generation. If you have a 100MW kite system, it would be such a substantial source of power that providing a backup to it when there is no wind or the cable breaks, will not be trivial.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/ [syslog.org]

Very short on details

[wyldeone]

The article is very short on details. For instance, how will they obtain the the power if the kites are floating hundreds or thousands of feet in the air? Unless their tethered, in which case on whose land would they be tethered? And what would they do when the wind drops?

Re:Without polluting...

[hhawk]

Exactly, they say,

"Professor Ockels says a few hundred of the installations, each requiring some 400 kites with 27ft wingspans, could generate enough electricity to supply the needs of a city the size of Seattle. The cost would be similar to that of generating power with polluting fossil fuels."

At a few hundred per city... that is a lot of kites..

Then you have to find the places to put them...

"The Laddermill would only be flown where aircraft are banned. One such area is the zone along the US-Mexican border, where high-flying balloons fitted with radar are used to combat drug traffickers."

Re:Ben Franklin

[Omniscientist]

Well, speaking of that experiment, I wonder if a blast of lightning would cause either even more power to be created or just screw up everything?

Superficially, this sounds like crackpot

[Tablizer]

If I had to rate the validity of ideas just by hearing an intro to the idea itself, this would score lower than cold fusion, harvesting cow farts, or launching satellites with a giant ACME slingshot.

What about impact?

[nwerneck]

I don't see many people analysing deeply the environmental impact of those technologies. Suppose EVERYBODY started using wind and sea power... couldn't this change el niño's mood or something?? Possibly the impact is very weak, but I would like to see the figures. And what about uniting the useful and the disagreeable? what about solar power centrals in the poles, where we are having already too much solar radiation??? :)

Wouldn't an autogyro be better than kites?

[Andy_R]

This laddermill requires a lot of untested technology, and some of the problems don't seem to have been addressed at all (such as how the kites 'know' if they should be going up or down, how to make cables that never break but are light enough to lift, and how to stop the 'up' kites and 'down' kites colliding.

Given that all the down kites, and the up kites below the level of high winds are dead weight, wouldn't it make more sense to just put a big tethered autogyro or 10 on the cable instead, and drive a generator from the prop rotation? This would eliminate the dead weight, replace the unstable kites with fail-safe autogyros that land gently naturally, and changes the requirement for a flexible cable that can cope with extreme tension for a requirement for a weaker less flexible cable that can transmit electricity, which should be easier to produce.

I know! Let's all just DIE!

[Chordonblue]

I remember when wind farms started generating controversy - mainly by those bothered by sight of them (see Kennedy's and the Nantucket Sound controversy). Those type of folks have paid obscene amounts of money to stop things like the Cape Wind project. Their reasoning (besides ruining their view of the sound in the morning)? It kills birds, it might change the climate, etc. Yeah... And what about the two coal plants that currently provide them electricity? In comparison, what do THEY generate?!

So when I see possible energy solutions like this one, it makes me rack my brains to think what excuse will these NiMBY folks use THIS time? Thanks so much for 'global stasis'. I can see the lawsuits now...

I vote for moving the coal plants in CT that feed Nantucket down near the Kennedy Compound. You might as well get them closer to where the HOT AIR is generated...

Yet another diversion

[Willard B. Trophy]

Oh no, not another wacko diversion from useful wind turbine design. I bet it'll make PopSci, just like all the other dumb energy things.

There was a similar idea to this about 20 years ago, called a "Lift Translator". It got goverment money. It made the cover of PopSci. It went precisely nowhere because it didn't work. This one's likely to work just as well/badly.

No-one I know in the wind energy industry thinks this 'laddermill" is remotely credible.

Re:nothing new

[nautical9]

That line of thinking reminds of a quote [imdb.com]:

[On smoking]
Ishmael: You should try to quit. They say its bad for your heart, your lungs. It quickens the aging process.
Roy: Who's done more research than the good people at the American Tobacco Industry? They say its harmless. Why would they lie? If you're dead, you can't smoke.

80,000 kites, 40 square miles

[h4x0r-3l337]

Professor Ockels says a few hundred of the installations, each requiring some 400 kites with 27ft wingspans, could generate enough electricity to supply the needs of a city the size of Seattle

"A few hundred"? That's at least 200, so we're talking about a minimum of 80,000, 27-foot kites, for a single large city. Then consider that each of these trains will be 5 miles long, and swaying in the wind. That means they need to stay some distance away from each other. My guess would be that half a mile between them (that's only 1/10th the length of a train) wouldn't be overly conservative. For a 14*14 installation (196 trains) that means just over 40 square miles (more than 25,000 acres) for a single installation. Sure, you can let some cows graze inbetween, but still. Somehow this whole scheme seems a little... impractical...

Re:nothing new

[Keith McClary]

Actually, "industry" is only concerned with maintaining civilization and the environment to the BARE MINIMUM necessary to keep the masses consuming product. Industry can destroy and destroy, up to the point just before people can no longer consume.

I'd say at least in the USA, we have a long way to go before we hit the bottom.

As long as you have access to other countrie's resources.

Re:Hey Ben...

[mogwai7]

Ben Franklin did not patent any of his inventions.

"As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously."
-Ben Franklin

Re:Global Stasis?

[eggstasy]

How did this crap get modded up to 5?
Wind is not finite or depletable.
Wind is constinuously generated by the sun's differential heating of our planet.
As the air warms, it expands and rises. As it cools, it contracts and falls down.
We will never have "global stasis" and it would be hella difficult to globally impact the weather system.
Global warming exists because gases travel and diffuse throughout the entire atmosphere.
Windmills are fixed.
Slowing down the wind a little bit here and there does not immediately affect anything, because there will always be one heck of a lot more untapped wind than the tapped amount.
Actually, most air circulation happens high enough that we'll never get to it with a windmill, something you would know had you RTFA - that's the very reason they proposed this wacky kite system.

Re:Feasable?

[shpoffo]

I've heard suggestions like this many times. My main arguement is that we should consider how tapping energy from the atmospheric layers above the Earth may impact our global ecology. Would it pull more dust from space, creating heavier Coronal Mass Ejection saturation? Would it have any impact on the geodynamo? As wonderful as were the ideas of Nikola Tesla (who was among the first to consider tapping the atmosphere for electrical power) it is important to give these ideas thorough review.

.
-shpoffo