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Energy from High-Altitude Kites

Posted by michael on from the sky-dragon dept.

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."

5 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. Article skimpy on details ( as usual ) by goofyheadedpunk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
  2. "Equal to some power stations"? by nwbvt · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
  3. Wouldn't an autogyro be better than kites? by Andy_R · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  4. I know! Let's all just DIE! by Chordonblue · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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..."
  5. Re:Feasable? by shpoffo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    -shpoffo