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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."
the only thing that is high.
How does this differ from regular windmills?
One strong gust of wind and the earth could start spinning the other way.
Sory, but there is still the pollution of the sky with man's stuff to worry about. If you put these in the air then it's essentially the same as the windmill problem only in the air. Granted, they'd be harder to see, but still there. But it's good to see that there are still solutions being envisioned and promoted that can help to save our planet.
Could this type of system withstand a strong storm system? Electrical energy, very high wind speeds...
What do you expect from a guy named Wubbo Ockels?
RTFA.
"How does this differ from regular windmills?"
More surface area. The overall thing I'm worried about is the upcoming pollution of the airspace. Kind of what happened to outerspace.
What would Benjamin Franklin have to say about this?
we dont need it. let's just get rid of energy, computers, etc. go back to living in a world where you know your neighbors.
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.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
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.
It's not even slashdotted. Yet.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
Also what will happen if the cable snaps. They worry about the kite, what about the heavy cables falling and destroying things down here.
With these cables how are they going to fly the kite from the ground ? Will they use turbines from the military planes to blow air ?
Anyone has more information about it ?
-a
"The Laddermill would only be flown where aircraft are banned. One such area is the" white house.
Paul
Well, it sounds like a good idea, but some faults, too.
One thing it said was that it could not be flown where pilots fly- this cuts down the number of places it can be flown by a lot.
And 27 foot wingspans ??? Hope it doesnt fall on any cardboard houses!
-- +
From TFA:
Ben Franklin didn't do his kite experiments to produce electricity. In fact he did his kite experiments in order to show that static electricity and lightening were indeed a facet of the same thing, electro-magnetism as we now know.
See the Wikipedia for more details.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
Don't worry, if it's successful it's not pollution we'll have to worry about - it'll be the fact that they absorb all the energy of the wind, mess up the climate, and then cause all sorts of weather anomalies. Instead of global warming, we'll have...global "stasis?"
Flying kites at high altitude isn't as easy as it seem: pretty soon you get a lot of problem from the line(s), chiefly the weight of the line, but also line drag.
The former problem is essentially a strength vs. weight problem that even high tensile lines made of dyneema won't solve easily (above 400/500m, a 6m parafoil can very well sit there and refuse to climb with standard lines).
The latter problem introduces a problem of angle, since the line becomes curved under the wind drag, which makes the section right under the kite more and more vertical as it climbs, which in turn "flattens" its incidence angle and reduces its lift. It's always possible to modify the incidence on the ground to compensate, but takeoff can get dicey then. And of course, the wind drag on the line also tends to pull the kite down, and it's not negligible with a lot of line up.
So yes, it should be possible to use kites to generate power, but there will have to be a great deal of electronic magic to regulate everything, down on the ground and up in the air, if high altitude flying is to be more than stunts performed by enthusiasts on good days with (semi-)controlled conditions.
why not use the kites to collect solar energy? Although, I don't know how better/worse this would be, but it could free up a lot of land needed to maintain solar panels - and depending on how high the kites are, could they could collect energy in nasty weather! With regards to aircraft, I'd say make these power-gathering areas no-fly zones -- otherwise how different is it from a field of broadcast towers?
Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...
since when does the industrial world care about maintaining itself?
we are destorying the world and each other, but who cares as long as we can have a nice hummer or the latest version of linux?
What they were saying was equal was the cost, not the total output per kite.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Since the power in the air is proportional to the cube of the speed, all speed up helps.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Most weather systems are located in the troposphere which is less than 30ft. Not many clouds are located are such high except cirrus which do not carry electrical charges.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
actually, Ben Franklin didn't do his kite experiment at all.
I thought Franklin flew the kite because he needed 1.21 gigawatts in order to send the DeLorean back to the future to pick up a load of cocaine or something like that.
I hadn't even thought of that, but yes, we would likely screw something up with too many of them, as we would be leeching energy from one of the most important systems in the atmosphere. There's a lot of energy up there, but removing even small amounts might have pretty adverse effects.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
This means the cable is actually ten-plus miles long. I don't remember my differential equations from twenty years ago, but I do know that as the cable gets longer (goes higher), the amount of weight supported increases. So half the loop is a five mile strand going up, and the other half is five miles of cable coming down. It sure seems like the weight on the top kites would be extraordinary. Do we have carbon-fiber cable yet?
And what happens when lighting hits it? Didn't Tesla manage some stunning current with a structure less tall than this?
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
I would look for traditonal fossil fuel burning companies (who would be threatened by competition) to be doing the actual sabotaging, instead of the initially obvious terrorists.
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/
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?
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
"It's not even slashdotted. Yet."
*sob!*
We failed!
They'll generate an enourmous amount of power during hurricane season?
1. Buy kites
2. Build kite wind farm in Florida.
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
Kite trains, or stacks, readily soar to heights greater than what can be attained with a single kite.
The record, set back in 1969, is 10,830 m abg. So the 30,000 ft mark has already been surpassed.
The single kite record stands at around 13K feet.
Why not use the differential between the earth and the air? Lightning proves that there's significent power on both sides of an insulator. A grid collector is also easier to keep up.
Behold the worlds largest lighting rod, how do they hope to manage that little problem?
Got Code?
He said: "As a kiteflier I have learned that what can go wrong will go wrong. I wonder about what happens if the line breaks. It appears the assumption made is that the kites will still fly in an upright and stable position. What if they, for example, turn 180 degrees to the wind and fly downwind and actually accelerate in speed to the ground?" Wouldn't the kites have to turn 90 degrees??? (pi/2 radians???)
You DO NOT talk about Kite Club.
maddmike and Roland Piquepaille have obviously been smoking out of the same bag
"One such area is the" white house."
How do you fly the white house?
...took the US a little too serously when we told them to go fly a kite.
(ducking)
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
Have a look at some of the plans and protoype pics of this behemoth, and it becomes clear (if not in the article) that the intention is for the ladder to be ground-originated, not just ground-anchored. This means the kites are travelling up from the ground to 5 miles and back again. The volume occupied by such a structure - especially one as non-static as this - would be monumental, not to mention the massive safety margin required to have more than one in operation within a few miles of any other ladder.
So if we're looking at 400 ladders to generate enough to power a city, we're look at a good 3000+ square miles of land if we're to be sure that no ladder is to collide with another. Not practical on any scale, I suspect.
Now if we're to be sure the things don't come down every time there's a spot of bad weather, we are looking at getting them up above the common cloud-cover atmospheric strata. In that case, why the hell not just use bigger kites, no ridiculous ladder-arrangement, and use the kite-wing surface-area to convert solar-energy? If the kites are well-engineered and -controlled enough to be able to operate in such a stringently unified fashion, I'm sure the same technology could be used to keep solar-kites in the air. True, the strain on the cables would be even greater if they have to be reliable electrical conduits as well, but that's really only one of several major flaws in this project.
Frankly, we'd be better off burning drug-addled research-scientists as fuel. They're renewable, at least.
Meta will eat itself
For more details, check the official website, cleverly titled:
http://www.laddermill.com/
or, for that matter, do a Google search for "laddermill":
http://www.google.com/search?q=laddermill
Now how hard was that?
Get ol' Ben to hold on to this kite...
I say we just take the people who came up with this and chain them to an exercise bike for power, anyone with me?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Don't tell Fight Club jokes.
Since these will be flown in areas that aircraft are banned, wont you need a huge network of high tension lines to get the energy anywhere.
I have a better plan! Set up giant lightning rods in lightning-prone areas with cabling that extends deep underground to chambers filled with water. Use the resulting steam to power turbines. Presto!
... Team leader Professor Wubbo Ockels (correct) was inspired by making and flying powerful high-flying kites as a boy. ...
Is that an editors comment accidently left in or are they saying this guy has a really funny name?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I cant imagine how much tension you'd need to transfer that kind of energy over that kind of distance. That would surely require a very heavy cable.
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?
Most of the places where aircraft are banned are due to other dangerous activities, such as live weapons testing. Not a good place to put infrastructure.
As far as the balloons on the border, here is an example from the descriptions on the appropriate aeronautical charts (referring to the few balloons on the border) -
CAUTION UNMARKED BALLOON AND CABLE TO 15000 FEET IN R-6317
The entries for the few other sites list alitudes of 14000 or 15000 feet. The chart doesn't say that aircraft are banned, but most pilots would avoid flying around the balloons just to be safe. In any case, it probably isn't a good idea to put kites on a cable in the same place as balloons on a cable, due to the risk of becoming entangled.
My personal guess is that the FAA will shoot this project down well before it gets off of the ground, unless the kites are equipped with transponders (since they will be in CLASS A* airspace) and lights (so that pilots flying VFR can see and avoid).
* For those without an aviation background, all aircraft in CLASS A airspace are required to fly instrument rules, have transponders, and are controlled by controllers on the ground. In the US, Class A airspace is all airspace between FL180 (about 18,000 feet) and FL600 (about 60,000 feet).
Mary Poppins would approve. And we all want to please Mary Poppins.
The idea of tethered high altitude wind power generation has been around for a long time. The people behind Sky Wind Power Corporation (http://skywindpower.com) have been developing their technology since 1979.
They do not use kites but a tethered electrical generator, like a helicopter with 2 fifteen foot rotors and no cabin. The documentation on their site seems to cover a lot of questions that would come up here, especially about the tether etc.
It is just sad to see another australian inventor having to go overseas to try and get their idea noticed.
Actually... just about anywhere aircraft are banned only means civilian aircraft. These are touchy airspaces the military has full access to for emergency response, so they won't allow a lot of cable and kites there.
Parent certainly should have RTFA, but the article isn't actually useful in this repect after all.
Only other protected airspace I can think of is some sensitive national parks, and people won't like it there either.
i can see the next episode of the Simpsons with Groundskeeper Willie with some kite contraption on the back of his tractor :^P
hahahaha
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.
Table-ized A.I.
The numbers don't make much sense. 100 megawatts is about 75 MILLION horsepower, or about 35 BILLION pound/feet per second. It would take a HECK of a kite string, probably thicker than a suspension bridge cable, to bring down that much power. Just supporting the cable is going to take a heck of a high wind.
If I remember correctly, his name is Charles Brown, PhD.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Psht! you call that ASCII art... Amateur...
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??? :)
Nicolau Werneck - NIC1138
"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of childhood into maturity" -- Thomas Huxley
The photos on the Laddermill web site showed a larger kite as the topmost item of the loop. This would imply that all the airfoils are being used for both support and generation. If you used an Aerostat as the topmost item wouldn't it: 1) remove the need for the airfoils to support the weight of the loop, and 2) remove the typical control issues when dealing with a kite - particularly during deployment and retrieval?
What about using those high altitude blimps that we're going to put up there anyway to supply us with wireless broadband? That way the cable wouldn't have to be as strong, and therefore not as heavy. And if you made the weak point of the cable close-ish to the ground, most of a snapped cable would dangle from the blimp rather than fall to the ground.
Or maybe i've got my altitude's wrong... maybe we need kite's launched from the blimps?
...as a bunch of utopian geeks writing and giving away first-rate software.
Thank you too for the link. The cable will be made from Dyneema, the world's strongest fiber. It is apparently a superstrong polyethylene fibre, which I assume means it won't conduct electrical strikes.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
http://www.ockels.nl/
-S
Look at the math.
A person can generate about 1/4 horsepower with an excersize bike. Given the daily rate for unskilled labor in many countries now, we could simply rig up a giant wheel like what Conan the Barbarian pushed around as a slave in that clearly prophetic movie.
Given the cost of building a nuke plant, then running it, getting rid of the waste, (hiding it really well for a really long time), and cleaning up after it -- it would be cheaper per kilowatt to simply have a bunch of low paid people push giant logs around in a circle.
The economics are outstanding. Its great excersize, and the power companies would be incented to provide health care at the same time. It provides plenty of jobs for unskilled labor, and could quickly be set up in the lowest income countries.
All in all, its a win-win. Best of all, it doesn't suffer from the one drawback everyone is clearly afraid to speak about with wind-power, which is the potential for slowing down the rotation of the earth! Clearly a danger if ever there was one. Why, if we slowed down the earth, and there was no centrifugal force apposing the gravity of our planet we would all be crushed! Oh the horror.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
The power is generated by the action of wind on the kite producing lift on half of the loop, and through manipulation of control surfaces, subsequent down-force on the other side of the loop. It's the mechanical conversion of wind-power that is harnessed here, so the simple lift generated by a blimp wouldn't work - how does it go down after it's ascent?
However, I think you'd be correct in another regard - having the kites anchored to a floating point (for example a blimp) would allow for a much more efficient system since the kites wouldn't have to go through thousands of feet of significantly slower wind each cycle. There's hope yet...
Meta will eat itself
Trust lawyers to kill this one dead.
Any drongo can see one of these things falling out of the sky. Just as there are freak waves / Tsunumi's there are freak winds up there too.
Be that may, stretching a cable between 2 points, and suspending a few, does seem more feasable - say between hi-rises.
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.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Don't you guys remember what happened to the people who wanted to follow Benjamin Franklin.
I think humanity needs to make more efficient use of electricity generated from wind, water and the sun. We could generate so much power if we built really big and efficient devices like these kites. Cool Stuff!
The winds do not blow the same direction as you go higher. Sometimes you get 90 degree shear or 180 deg shear. The poor kites will always be doing a shuffle to work correctly and efficiently between the low-level, mid-level, and high-level winds. I think that this plan is how he plans to get his pies-in-the-sky......
A fascinating man. He discovered electricity, and used it to torture small animals and green mountain men. And that key he tied to the end of a kite, IT OPENED THE GATES OF HELL!
(oblig. Simpsons quote)
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
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...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
http://www.ockels.nl/Flash/laddermill_flash_v1.htm l
A person can generate about 1/4 horsepower with an excersize bike. Given the daily rate for unskilled labor in many countries now, we could simply rig up a giant wheel like what Conan the Barbarian pushed around as a slave in that clearly prophetic movie.
....
You're talking about outsourcing energy generation.
Bad idea.
Here in America, we've got a huge percentage of our population locked up in prisons. Let them do the hard work!
Pedal, you lazy dogs -- I said pedal! And get me another glass of lemonade, while you're at it
-kgj
-kgj
Ya, maybe we should blow up all those MOUNTAINS on Earth. After all, they too must be blocking wind.
Ohhhh NOoooo!!!! THE EARTH IS GOING TO DIE!!!!!
To the parent, just kill yourself now. Please?
Life is not for the lazy.
(from another /. post)
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
If height is the issue, then why not have a tethered blimp hoist wind turbines? You could even cover the top of the blimp with flexible solar panels and have a high-flying hybrid system and you don't have worry about bombing people with a giant bicycle wheel if the wind died. If the weather gets bad just reel the blimp in.
Use the pancake rotor types, carbon composite blades, you could make some pretty high production turbines that were light enough to be raised by a blimp. Some kind of frame and the tether could double as the transmission cable.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
...its not a bad idea. The more things are against the law, the cheaper power gets -- but, given that most of the prisons are filled with drug crimes, I'm not sure your average opiate addict will generate as much energy at all.
As to those soon to be jailed for (gasp) copying specific paterns of magnetically polarized rust (file sharing and music sharing) -- The average 12 year old inhaler sucking thick lensed computer kid isn't likely to be the best source of power either.
Besides, the cable tv provided to prisons consumes too much power. It becomes a drain on the output of the "plant".
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
This reminds me of a game called "Armor Alley" in which the player attempts to fly a helicopter past blimps on strings and enemy forces. I remember the helicopter died when it hit a blimp's string. What prevents a sudden gust of wind from blowing the kites into unsuspecting air traffic?
Whenever I hear of stuff like this these days, I have to wonder whether ideas such as these are still feasible with todays "There's a terrorist behind every door" mentality. Certainly these projects are possible, but who's going to fund, let alone protect such things to the point where it becomes the standard, vs. some niche technology?
Large, seemingly hard-to-protect items such as these would have "terrorist target" written all over it.
Back in the early nineties, there was talk about providing broadband via a series of unmanned drones which would circle above . Can you imagine such a plan now? People would be worried, and arguably justified in thinking that terrorists would be trying to sabotage them, bringing them down upon the homes below. It's weird that this was a serious idea not too long ago. It really illustrates how the world has changed since 9/11.
It also makes me wonder about the likelihood of technologies such as the legendary "Space Elevator" idea. It sounds great in theory, but how do you protect such visible targets from some Osama and the other fags?
And if you're on the "The terrorists are more the work of big media and politicians, than they are reality" side of the fence, I'm sure that you can envision the years of delays and bickering which would probably kill such a project as this before it gets off the ground. Much less the funding that would be neccesary (paltry when compared to say... a war around the globe, but awfully hard to push through as easily), and the patent suits which would follow.
I'm not trying to be a pessimist here, but I think the world will have to change a lot from it's current state before projects such as these are feasible. Projects such as this won't be a possibility until the world can learn to trust one another again and work (he cringes as he types the hated words) as a team. Right now meaningful (and neccesary!) reseach and projects are being stifled by distrust, politics, fear, and money.
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.
An hour after reading about this, I'm pretty far into a screen play loosely based on Professor Wubbo Ockels, his passion for kites, and his dream of generating power with them. It's hard though, not borrowing too much from Willy Wonka.
"As to those soon to be jailed for (gasp) copying specific paterns of magnetically polarized rust (file sharing and music sharing) -- The average 12 year old inhaler sucking thick lensed computer kid isn't likely to be the best source of power either."
Well I'm sorry to tell you this, CFD339. But your "Bunch of cheap atoms arranged as a form of motive power" has been "translocated to another location" out of your control (Carnapped).
instead of cardio equipment like treadmills and excersize bikes, high quality weight machines, with the cables tied to hidden flywheels would be an excellent source of power. That makes sense.
Rewards also come to mind. A "company store" approach to keep "workers" in debt has been effective in many developing countries. Perhaps has a similar solution then. Condomns and lubricant for example, could be sold at a premium. Not to mention, given the concern you mentioned, perhaps "soap on a rope" would be a premium product for its less liklihood of dropping to the floor.
Excellent ideas, sir.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
It's got the same problem as all the other wind and sun systems: it's intermittent. Without a reasonable energy storage system or a massive energy transfer system, it's not going to replace all that much reliable generation technology.
John Roth
Or, you could just download Firefox and let it automatically hyperlink the links for you.
See how we could lift an ultra-light, ultra-strong, solar-powered stairway-to-heaven? Get it?
this is probably one of those ideas that fit well in the ideal hydrogen economy. harness energy out in deserts, where there is little whether to deal with but still high winds at such high alltitudes, then transfer the hydrogen created by it back to population centers. not to say i think the idea is the greatest, but they used to say that a space elevator was stupid, and a lot of people are changing their minds about that. *shrug*
Sorry dude, but its kinda funny that you give us all these technical terms and figures, then misspell steel.
Yet another crazy dutch idea :D
From wubbo ockels (if i spelled that correct)
the 1st (and i think the only) Dutch astronalt that went into space long time ago.
It will interfere with broadband balloons! I mean, my god, it will be awful. Electric kits and Internet balloons, where will it end?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
that is what really makes me angry at our so called bleeding heart democrats, e.g, Ted Kennedy, they want to never be directly affected by their legistlation.
If they really favor alternative fuels then they would not live in such excessivly large houses.
About the only things operating over 60K feet are military/spook planes that get to make their own rules, and SpaceShip One....
"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...
"In the end times, webs will be spun in the sky"
This is an ancient Hopi Indian prophesy.
Reminds me of a short novel published in an early 60s Analog by Walt and Leigh Richmond (which may have been called "Shortstack").
A lone genius move out into an arid southwest desert and quickly bulldozes out an underground home. He then feeds one end of a roll of sheet plastic into a jig that turns it into a very long tube.
After attaching some wire our genius somehow flies the entire (mile long?) tube up into the sky like a kite, and fastens the bottom end to a rig on the ground.
The air near the earth being relatively warm rushes up the tube, stiffening it. The resulting current turns a fan blade, powering an electrical generator.
Condensation along the inside of the tube constantly trickles down and provides all the water our hero needs.
I think he gets the girl.
harvesting cow farts
Actually, the money seems to be in cow burps.
Strong high altitude winds acting on the "kitewings" produce as upward force on one side of the loop and a downward force on the other, causing it to rotate.
Hmm, couldnt you tap the same kind of energy from the upwards and downwards motion of people having sex?
Not legally.
I think you are confused. The kites are mentioned being 27 feet wide, but five miles (30,000 ft is 5.7 miles) up.
aQazaQa
Considering the fact he is long deceased, I expect not very much...
Tension bridges use Parallel Wire Cables for Suspension Bridges under extreme loads strands can fail without causing a critical failure of the cable.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I think it won't be a problem. It's the same with static discharge: You have a big potential difference but just a very small amount of charge (electrons). After a very short high current all charge is moved and the difference in potential is neutralized. The current might be high, but the total energy involved is too small to matter. It's like switching on a 10kW lamp for 0,0001 second. The lamp won't even get warm.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
Kitemaster Peter Lynn from New Zealand has a similar design.
Original usenet posting
A page describing the idea
I think Lynn's implementation is much simpler. The slowly-rotating cable described in the article requires huge gears to produce energy (gears are already a problem on standard large-diameter wind turbines). Lynn's design uses an efficient, high-speed turbine on the kite itself and transmits the power down through the tether. Instead of a complicated circle of kites he uses just one big kite that flies around in circles on a single tether. The turbine can be powered from the ground and used as a propellor to take off, land and keep aloft during lulls in the wind.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Used to be that the parents would say "go fly a kite" to get the kid to go do something other than drive them crazy. Guess he took them to literally. They also don't seem to take other things into account, like kite's and air planes, or with enough kites it could stop the wind. Yet another form of pollution, stagnant air. Why we don't simply go to nuclear power more is beyond me. Guess the nuclear boogyman is still out there scaring people.
instead of cardio equipment like treadmills and excersize bikes, high quality weight machines, with the cables tied to hidden flywheels would be an excellent source of power. That makes sense.
... the more I think about it, the more ridiculous is becomes!
....
This all started out as a ridiculous joke, but my God
Lord of the Flies meets Charles Atlas at the company store
-kgj
-kgj
I use Safari, which is superior in every other aspect. So fuck off.
That would certainly keep us in the running until actual fusion reactors can start providing the world with completely pollution-free power.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The issue which gets me is the tension in the up-side of the cable. If it is moving upward at 10 m/sec (about 22 MPH) a 100 megawatt system would require 10 million newtons of tension in the cable. That's about 2.25 million pounds! You could cut the tension if you could increase the cable speed (power = force * speed) but it's not obvious how you could get it to more than than the wind speed (even by flying the kites back and forth crosswind). Flying a kite down through a layer of calm air wouldn't present problems, but pulling one up through calm air to reach a wind means the cable would have to support its own weight plus the becalmed kites and their air drag.
The gyromill concept may have more mechanical complexity but it seems like it would deal with those problems a bit better.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Several groups have been studying hanging kilometer long wires from satellites to generate energy for the satellite or space habitation. These operate on the same principle: exploit the electric field gradients in the earth's magnetosphere.
Several orbital experiments have been tried. I recall one time mechanical problems prevented full unwinding of the cable. Another time the cable shorted and burnt apart from a power surge. I suspects these bugs will be eventually fixed by the engineers.
The kite has the potential to capture a minute percentage of power available for a given operational site. For safety reasons one needs a diameter roughly equal to the extended length which is roughly 1.5 times the operating altitude. The theoretical capacitity of a site is 59% of the available wind moment across the site in a plane perpendicular to the wind direction. A Kite would occupy only the tiniest fraction of this capacity and as such is highly ineffecient with respect to real estate. A Vertical wing array on the other hand interfaces all of the wind available to a site, and while it has aspects in common with a kite, it may resolve some of the issues mentioned here - primarily in that it does not seek the fastest air at impractical altitude, but simply increases surface area in low wind conditions for higher power to cost ratios. AIK
The real problem is when you have a failure which causes an "uncontrolled descent into terrain", or worse, an "in-flight airframe failure". Such possibilities are why you wouldn't site these things in populated areas (and ought to zone all land in the potential debris landing area as agricultural). Fortunately, there is one hell of a lot of land in the USA which meets this description. Trust me on this; I just drove from Wichita to Chicago, and huge swaths of KS, MO and IL are almost ideal. So are most of TX, NM, AZ, CO, UT, NV, WA, OR, WY, MT, ND, SD, IA, MN, WI, NB, big parts of OH and MI... and that's just land I've been across personally in the last 10 years.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I am surprised, this being /. and all, that nobody seems to have mentioned that the source code for their simulation is available. So not only is their plan interesting, but they seem to want the community to help engineer both their software and the device itself through testing and simulation.
like g-a-r-y, only different
Undoubtedly the energy that combines to form lightning could be harnessed and siphoned off before forming into lightning bolts. That's a really good, pre-emptive solution. But the kites would get tugged on by the wind. The obvious solution would be to erect a scaffold-grid and the kites would be tethered so they could move as the wind blows. But then this would become a major expense. Maybe one day if we get really DESPERATE we can try it. There are a lot of other power sources available yet to be tried. http://www.newpath4.com/icyhot7.htm is one. However, this idea of kites shouldn't be altogether shelved. Were lightning strikes to increase in either number or severity it might help having an energy siphon system.
Sea-basing the Gyromills means you have much more expensive support requirements, transmission cabling, the works. Skywind mentions cities all over the North American continent, so I doubt they are restricting themselves to off-shore sites; for their initial trials, perhaps.
Sustainability and energy independence essay