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Harvesting Energy in the Sky
withoutfeathers writes "The Economist magazine has an article on Flying wind farms. Mind you, we're not talking about ordinary, terrestrial windmills here. We're talking about actual airborne — up to 10km in the sky — wind farms intended to harvest the immense supply of energy in the jet stream. On the surface, the idea seems a little eccentric but, in fact, San Diego (California, US) based Sky WindPower has, apparently, thought their concept through pretty thoroughly and believes they can not only make this work, but do so profitably. The article discusses several other ideas for high-flying wind farming including a Dutch proposal to use pairs of kites to drive a generator."
Hope they tell the FAA before they put one up...
Somehow, putting up tons of windfarm hardware in the jetstream, strikes me as a great way to disrupt airtravel.
This is a terrible idea. Harnessing wind down by the ground is local, but sucking energy out of the jet stream will cause problems "down stream". Operate a sizable "facility", sit back, and watch the "unintended side effects" proliferate.
:D
Granted, I didn't RTFA.
If we take the kinetic energy out of the wind and transform it into electrical energy, will this cause any problems? If we do so on a major scale?
Is it even possible for us to tap enough power from the jet stream (or other high altitude winds) to cause problems?
is it a bird, a plane, no its just a wind farm...
The SHPEGS project is an initiative to design and build a system that uses a combination of direct and indirect solar collection to generate electricity and store thermal energy in an economical, environmentally friendly, scalable, reliable, efficient and location independent manner using common construction materials.
I once had a similar idea: to pull energy right out of the air. Here's what I would do: separate a sealed chamber into two subchambers with a little door between them that could be opened. Have some kind of monitor determine *just* the right time to open it so as to increase the pressure in one side. When the pressure difference is large enough? Have one side expand against the other, drawing out useful work. End result? Both chambers have the same pressure *which is less than atmosopheric*! So to recharge, I just open it up to the atmosphere, and start over again.
:-/
Go, me, right?
After a few days of this, I woke up to find a severed horse's head in my bed. A note attached to it said. "You're depressurizing the atmosphere. Stop."
That settled it for me
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Gather 3 wives and their mothers in front of these devices: output to be rated at MW/cup of coffee.
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
"The Economist magazine has an article on Flying wind farms. Mind you, we're not talking about ordinary, terrestrial windmills here.
You're kidding? Flying wind farms aren't ordinary, terrestrial windmills? You learn something new every day!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
But what of Global Calming?
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
It will be really sad when this idea comes crashing down... ;-)
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
This is all another conspiracy by big buisness to create global warming. Their plan is now to try to steal the energy of the spinning planet in order to create an day that lasts longer than 24 hours! /straps on tinfoil hat and holds on for the ride.
Hey, lets put a bunch of aircraft up at 10km, with cables that tie them to the ground! Excellent idea! Why didn't anyone think of this before?
Oh, that's right - they did. They used them to prevent aircraft from flying over towns/cities/military targets (it sort of worked).
It also doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to stick a bunch of obstacles up in the jet stream. You know, where airliners tend to like to fly (at least when going west to east).
Oh, and doesn't the jet stream tend to be rather dynamic - as in, it's course often changes by hundreds or even thousands of miles?
Well since Global Warming is just a matter of too much energy in the system, maybe Global Calming would mitigate some of the weather pattern effects. (yes I know you being humorous)
We are all just people.
The main effect will be that butterflies will flap their wings slightly differently.
"Is it even possible for us to tap enough power from the jet stream (or other high altitude winds) to cause problems?"
No. The total power we could possibly harvest with systems like those in the article is not worth mentioning in the scale of the total energy in the jet stream. Windmills take a few percent of the energy of the wind that actually passes over them, wich would only be a tiny fraction of the wind in the jet stream.
You know what else tends to reside in the path of the jet stream? Storm systems.
I bet that these things would make excellent conductors for lightning. Take them down when storms approach and put them back up afterwards? Probably not feasible.
Then again, they would probably build up a heck of a static charge themselves just with the wind flowing over them.
Oh yeah, would ice build-up be a problem? Maybe not at the windmill itself, but on the tether, perhaps.
Seems to me there's a few (obvious) technical hurdles to address, first./p.
High as a kite, riiiight.
This is a totally fucked up idea that has no hope of becoming reality. However, certain venture capitalists that have the ears of certain elected officials, retired milirary leaders, and recent political appointees think that this is certainly worthy of (1) government contracts, (2) earmarks in military spending bills, and (3) "grants" from the DOE, Military, and any other government agency that has a large amount of government gave-a-way cash to burn.
Thankfully, these cash infusions will allow technology companies to hire a least one full time patent attorney, with the goal of monopolizing any technology that could even be remotely useful to anyone else. Just in case the IPO doesn't make us billionaires.
Thank God that these guys are looking out for us and the environment through technology.
(nudge-nudge-wink-wink, Walmart's on board with this plan too - makes 'em look good and feel good)
Or another major world war. Wars kept the human population in check for a long time. Now with our "mostly" peaceful society one of the two major population reducers have been removed. With medical not far behind soon disease won't be much of a problem.
Most of the energy humans use is returned right back into the atmosphere either as heat or simple particle motion. Cars heat the air and fight against nonmoving air, computers produce heat and light, and feeding people allows them to create heat, for examples.
ResidntGeek
"Their plan is now to try to steal the energy of the spinning planet in order to create an day that lasts longer than 24 hours!" And thus Jenova could Finaly conquer the whole planet, if we do not stop them and blow up the Reactors er windfarms.
Make sure you get started on that.
(Unintended consequences are a big deal and all that, but you can drink about all the water you want out of a very small stream without affecting it, which is a reasonable analogy here(the harvested energy is such a small component of the total atmospheric energy that there really isn't any reason at all to worry unless you want people not using the energy for some other reason.))
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The cable that is tethering it to the ground will be a hazard to aviation and all altitudes below the generator. Not only would the cable be very hard to see, but, unlike power cables and guy wires for antennas, it would also be hard to chart, since I imagine that the generator will move around quite a bit as the jetstream fluctuates.
Well, the technical hurdle is capturing the energy from a massive electrical discharge and then releasing it in a controlled form. You can't just send it through some super transformer to knock down the voltage because, even if you could, the voltage rise/fall time is so fast that the inductive impedance of the transformer would probably make it quite ineffective. Even if you could down convert the voltage of the lightning, you'd have difficulty building a device that could accept such a large inrush of current in such a short period of time. Direct application of the electrical energy is most likely out.
I would think that a solution for capturing this energy would reside in a less direct solution, such as dissipating the energy into a medium (i.e. specialized oil, or vaporization of a liquid) as heat, then using standard thermodynamic heat flow to mechanically spin a turbine or something. There's several forms of energy conversion in the whole process of something like that, but it would be done to better manage the storage and release of the captured energy.
Of course, the next problem is finding a relatively abundant source of atmospheric electrical discharge to make something like this economically feasible.
All 1.21 Jiggawatts of it!
No... the consequences might be unpredictable and could be potentially harmful. It might turn out actually... good. Sometimes progress is actually progress.
Big, expensive, and high-tech is the most likely way we are going to solve our resource problems.
The problem is the tether: it's like the space elevator, the physics all works, as long as you can assume an infinitely cheap material that's incredibly strong and light. Notice that none of the companies in the article have actually built anything.
It's a good thing it might be profitable, otherwise we would have to forget about the idea forever.
According to this public disclosure meeting in 2001, whereby high ranking government officials, very senior ex-military, black project staff, and ex-NASA employees pointed out... Zero point energy (aka. free energy) devices already exist, and have for decades, but are hidden by secret black project government programs due to the massive economic impact it would have on the world (i.e. no more need for OIL).
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCLOIcFTSlE
It's time USA citizens wrote their congress men and appealed for all of these senior government etc officials to have a chance to testify under oath as they have promised to do. To date the disclosure project has over 400 such officials willing to testify. This is not wacko conspiracy theorists coming up with crazy theories... it's about the largest government cover up in the history of the modern world.
Adeptus.
PS. If the above is not enough to motivate you, think about how a world without burning fossil fuels would end the global warming impact nearly overnight! The evidence is simply overwhelming. See the video for yourself.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
But have they considered the ramifications of "harvesting" energy from the Jet Stream? Any energy they "extract" is removed from that part of the system, and could alter the delicate balance that exists. We're already screwing up our worlds temperature through greenhouse gas emissions, destroying parts of the food chain via pollution through several vectors, draining crop soils of nutrients by over-farming, over-fishing the oceans stocks, losing plant and animal species both near and at the base of the food-chain because of a number of human factors, etc, etc. When will we get a clue? I will add that if done in a way so as to minimally stress the system, then it should be researched further and potentially executed.
In other news, we've already colonized several other star systems and have created a human alien hybrid. Am I missing anything else? Oh yeah, Bush Jr. was on the Grassy Knoll and really killed Kennedy.
But fractions of percents are all we're discussing with regard to global warming, too...
By necessity, any generation of electricity is going to remove energy from our environment somehow. (In the case of fossil fuels, this is stored chemical energy, but it still came from somewhere.) Hydroelectric power, the big (and relatively environmentally friendly) energy producer where I live, requires a whole river to be diverted. This wind power proposal is more like sticking your toe into a fast-moving stream. It seems fair to assume (so long as we lack evidence to the contrary) that it is unlikely to have a significant effect (good or bad), and it would replace technologies with known negative effects.
Your argument seems to me no different than one which says we should not harness electricity from tidal changes because it contributes to tidal locking between the earth and moon. In both cases, the amount of energy likely to ever be extracted is only a very small portion of the total energy available.
Nothing else to say.
Keeping airplanes and birds from hitting the tether could be an issue -- the former an aviation safety problem, the latter a reliability problem for the power station.
I'd honestly be more concerned with global warming killing the jet stream than this. The jet stream is largely the result of low-altitude/surface-level thermal gradients (ie the equator to pole temperature difference). Given that most climate models predict the poles will warm significantly more than the equator, if they turn out to be correct I'd say that's far more troubling to the jet stream than a few big kites.
I think somebody's been watching too many Miyazaki movies.
Our planet is not necessarily overpopulated. The problem is the impact that those 6 billion or so are having. More specifically, the impact that a minority of those 6 billion are having.
If there were only 2 billion people consuming resources at the rate of Americans, our situation would be more dire.
Having said that, the impact of dumping long-buried carbon into the atmosphere to fuel our energy-hungry habits is almost certainly far worse than the impact of reducing the energy level of the jet stream by a tiny fraction.
... what about the power transfer cable? I can't imagine a cable that can carry 10MW of juice over 10KM of distance could possibly considered a lightweight matter. This little helicopter contraption will need to generate power AND have enough energy to remain aloft under the weight of that cable. I think it's an interesting concept, but the solution to all our future power woes? Enh. While we're dreaming big, I'd be more interested in this Energy Island concept being built out.
Can we put these down in the carribean and pull energy out of the atmosphere to stop or atleast weaken hurricanes?
I can see the protests now: "Not above my back yard".
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
Think about it for just *ONE FREAKING SECOND*!!! If we harness all this energy, that means jet streams get affected.
New jet streams = new ocean currents
New jet streams+new ocean currents=Massive climate change in 48 hours.
It's all been predicted. If these wind farms actually were established today, I'm predicting that New York City will be covered with glaciers by the end of Friday, which means not today, not tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow!
This idea is really funny, i want to be the one contacted to get this wind farm up in the sky, because i just think that it would be one of the funniest things i will ever do. My workers will look at me like a complete idiot when i tell them that i need this here wind farm up in the jet stream, way way up there. I doubt that anyone will take this seriouly enough to do it. All the same i believe that they should give it a shot, just because i want to watch them put it up in the sky where it probably doesn't belong and probably wouldn't stay for long. So for pure entertainment purposes i hope they go through with this crazy idea. Hahahahaha :)
I think the amount of air displaced by Chuck Norris doing a roundhouse kick would be enough to generate enough power for the entire Earth!
Or they could just go with nuclear.
Also the cables would probably become lighting conduits if they are insulators and lighting discharge if they are conductors. If we are constantly discharging the potential between the earth and the upper atmosphere I would expect this would have profound effects on the weather.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I was under the impression that the jet stream moved around throughout the year...
I've been asking this question for years, never meeting with a satisfying response. There is no such thing as 'free' energy.
Another point, raised by Arthur C Clarke, is that the side effect of all this energy conversion will always be more heat.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
Our planet is not necessarily overpopulated. The problem is the impact that those 6 billion or so are having. More specifically, the impact that a minority of those 6 billion are having.
Not true at all. While everyone likes to paint the Americans and other first-worlders as ruining the planet, the third-worlders are certainly doing their part as well.
Look at a satellite image of Haiti, and compare it to its neighbor Dominican Republic. Haiti is dirt-poor, but they're busy chopping down every tree on their side of the island, causing all kinds of problems with erosion and destruction of the marine environment offshore.
In Brazil, they're busily chopping down the rainforests to make way for agriculture. The rainforests are a huge carbon sink and change a lot of the CO2 in our atmosphere to O2, plus they have an enormous amount of biodiversity, with potential medicines waiting to be discovered there.
Pollution has become an enormous problem in places like China and Vietnam because of the rapid industrialization there.
It's not just resource consumption, but also resource management. At least the first-worlders have put some limits in place on pollution (especially the toxic kind, rather than CO2), which the third-worlders happily ignore in their ignorance.
The only way our planet could healthily support more people at a decent standard of living is for everyone to live peacefully in arcologies or other high-density utopian environments. The only way this will happen is if scientists can genetically modify all future humans to no longer be human: to not fight, to not be greedy or evil, to not be intolerant or force others to yield to their will, etc. Basically, we need to all act like ants, working only for the common good and completely ignoring any personal needs or wishes. Good luck with that.
If the inventor builds it without running a good faith calculation, it's unethical. I don't care if it's "obvious" that the scale is too small. Run a calculation and document it. Publish the results. Then if anything does go wrong later, we can look back and see where the calculation went wrong. If nothing goes wrong, we have a documented track record of success.
Uh huh. Some guy named Gibbs had some. I learnt about it in college.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Birth control? I think it's a little late if you want to manage resources by population reduction. Think more along the lines of 1943 in Poland.
To get pollution and resource consumption down to "sustainable" levels where waste products are natually recycled again we need to cut the population to no more than 200 million people. And that is assuming a high level of technology to support that many. Without a lot of technology, maybe more like 50 million is realistic.
Birth control isn't going to help when we are talking about a 97% drop in population. To do this within the next 20 years would require killing a million people a day for 20 years. However, if we want "sustainable" and restrict the environment to what is here on Earth alone we better get started because the problem is just getting worse every day.
No, George Bush Jr. Went out drinking with Kennedy, got him so sloshed that he had alcohol poisoning and the D.T.s the next day, and they had to shoot him before he became a national embarassment by announcing Free Zero-Point Energy and Open Bars for the North Vietnamese.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
October 10, 2006, Wired: Generating Power From Kites
"KiteGen", a kite-driven rotating carousel generating electricity. The kites, at altitudes up to 2Km, could be quickly maneuvered to avoid aircraft, even individual birds. An initial cost of 360,000 euros for a 100m model could generate .5Gw of electricity. A 2 Km version could generate 5 Gw. A proposed initial site is the former Trino Vercellese nuclear power plant, already a no-fly zone.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Your numbers are wrong. Humanity can only exist at "sustainable levels" if there are fewer than six of us.
To be fair to the third world, the US already chopped down the majority of its first growth timber(the woods we have now are largely regeneration). Crying that others are doing the same thing without keeping that in mind smacks of 'I've got mine'.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
iirc jet streams play a role in transporting cool air from the poles to the equator and vice versa. In other words they help moderate the earth's temperature, so if a significant amount of jet stream energy were harnessed I imagine that the poles would become cooler and the equator would become hotter as a result.
Interesting post:
2
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2423#comment-17629
I do believe much of the status is self-conceived more than socially conferred (ie, these people are driven by the need to feel better than others, to exult in the moral superiority obtained by having acted righteously or refrained from sin, etc.), though they tend to find each other and build echo chambers to validate these inner assessments (how much of the internet can be described this way...?)
Birth control well said. We first need to shoot every economist who still says that no growth is bad and then every idiot who calls me a Luddite. Reducing the population of worlds worst pest will do wonders to our world problems. (No I won't leave first but I do only have one child.)
Secondly taking energy out of the antmosphere is a great thing. The global warming (I there is such a thing because New Zealand has been cooling 0.9 degrees centigrade over the last decade)puts energy into the atmosphere and windmills take it out again. Hey it's energy recycling!
I'd be surprised if pilots are allowed to fly aircraft themselves in a decade from now. So avoiding a few lousy powerstations won't be a problem.
Icing? No problem. The cables are made of aluminium and as such not a great conductor. To keep the weight down these cables need to be thin hence they probably are going to be hot or at least warm anyway.
Weight? Yeah to total killer of this concept. There is no hope in hell they can build cables light enough to transfer energy to the ground while keeping the kite tethered. However, I can think of a variation of this idea. They could use the tether as a method to transmit rotational energy to the ground. A ground based pulley system and a 20 km long loop of fancy nanotube super light cable running as a chain between the airborne windmill and the ground. The generator remains firmly on the ground. This reduces the weight of the airborne system a lot while the power station can now stay aloft at very low wind speeds. Ow, bugger it. I made a picture. Here have a look,
http://vandinther.googlepages.com/home
I don't even think such a power station would need to be in the jetstream to function thanks to it's much lower weight. Of course if the cable breaks then you are uh... well actually no. The return cable can be just slightly longer. Breakage of the cable can be detected by a sudden reduction of tension on the drums and the return cable can immediately be locked in place while electronics adjust the rotors to reduce the tension to a minimum.
I'm not sure how feasible it would really be, but I remember ideas of solar collectors in space that would beam their energy back down to the Earth by microwaves.
"Windmills do not work that way, goodnight!"
Perhaps you are neglecting the Butterfly Effect.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Falling to the ground is rather unlikely. If the unit can still be controlled, the best scenario is to just let it autorotate down and lay its cable down gently as it goes.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
When you pull energy from the sky it is gonna have side effects such as disturbing the balance that is the jet stream. This problem is similar to the idea of deep sea power generators (which generate electricity from the temp difference between the surface and the deeper waters) This type of power plant on a large scale would cause ocean temperature drops. This might be a good idea to build those generators near ice caps? Get those glaciers from falling apart possibly.
Balderdash!
You can get tethered wind turbines now. One company is http://www.magenn.com/. Here is a writeup from a distributor http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/partner/s tory;jsessionid=89EBAB338FE0B78CFA33259EF429902B?i d=41478. This is not for placement in the jet stream but
it is not bad for getting into more steady power generation.s -selling-solar.html
--
The Sun makes the wind blow: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
How exactly would the US government not releasing this technology to its people *be bad* for America? Considering the fact that billions of dollars are leaving the US (billions that could otherwise be invested right back into OUR OWN ECONOMY), I have a hard time believing that any US government official would keep this under cover.
If what you're saying is true, then keeping this technology under wraps is probably the single most charitable gesture the US government has made in its history. How many countries across the globe make a significant/most of their GDP through Oil Exports? A shit load of them. Is the US GDP primarily from Oil Exports? No. Is the GDP primarily from oil revenues and taxes? No.
I think after all the shit the US has gone through in the last 30-40 years, it's pretty clear to everyone that 1) Energy is Everything, 2) Oil is bad, mmkay, and 3) America's heart might be in the right place, but it's foreign policies blow.
On the other hand, maybe we're just biding our time until the world oil supply dries up (which I don't believe will ever happen). Then we'll keep said zero point energy for ourselves, drill the hell out of Anwar et al., and make megatons of money by monopolizing the world's supply of energy. It just might work...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Army_Balloon_Co rps before the blitz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon. There were problems
though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon#Disad vantages.s -selling-solar.html
--
Ground based solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Windmills take a few percent of the energy of the wind that actually passes over them, wich would only be a tiny fraction of the wind in the jet stream.
Even of the wind that actually passes through the area "swept" by the blades, the max it can harvest is about 59.3%. This is the "Betz Limit", the aerodynamic counterpart of the Laugher Curve of government revenue versus tax rates:
- Extracting power slows and deflects the air.
- Slowing and deflecting the air reduces the amount of moving air you can extract power from.
- Don't slow/deflect it and you get no power, stop it completely and you get no air - and thus no power. Zero at both ends, non-zero between. Somewhere there's a maximum.
- The maximum (for compressible fluids in free space) is where you extract 16/27ths of the energy from the air you affect (which is essentially the stream of air that passes through the area swept by the blades).
Real turbines can get very close to that, and most of the shortfall is a bit of energy left as rotation and turbulence in the wake.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Sorry, I reply again because I want to be heard. Of course a flying powerstation with generators on board and a power cable running down at 10 km length is impossible. Way too heavy but there is no reason why the enegry can not be transferred mechanically via the very tether that holds the power station in place.
I have made a little diagram and description here: http://vandinther.googlepages.com/home
What do you think, can it be done?
Embrace and extend new planetary bodies, it worked for Microsoft.
In the meantime all we (humanity) has to do is get there and we can get off this mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam. Population control, technological fear-mongering, and ignorance are what drives the US to the bottom of the world in thinking professions.
Keep it the genious attitude, the Chinese are going to the moon. No doubt they're going to do something productive with the output. I wouldn't worry though, you can go protest the damage their rocket is going to do to the environment as they bring humanity one step closer to surviving the next astronomic event.
The kind of energy being described in this article could be generated worldwide, and provide the gap needed in areas with limited infrastructure. If you're talking about unintended consequences, how about the "cooling" affect of all the coal plants shutting down around the world that a massive deployment of flying generators would create?
The big picture is staring you in the face, and it's on the next asteroid, the next magnetic pole shifting, or high altitude comet impact. This looks like a good step towards getting the infrastructure we need to relocate a chunk of the world's population. Which would effectively square humanity's chances of survival (hell maybe even better, I'm terrible at statistics.)
I seriously doubt it. According to wiki, the wind travels at about 55km/h in the summer, and 120km/h in the winter.
What are chances that the geographical areas where these contraptions are installed get hit by bad weather (i.e. typhoons, tornados, hurricanes, hailstorms, lightning, etc)?
They're in the jet stream. That's up at the TOP of the troposphere. The turbulent violence you're talking about happens further down - the top mostly just has winds, and the jet stream is already the worst of it.
Assuming the power station comes down in any uncontrolled fashion, and from the heights they are talking about and the strong jet stream winds they are dealing with, the power generation station could potentially travel many miles before it hits ground, endangering a very very large area below.
Now that would depend on the type of elevated structure. But most of them have acceptable failure mechanisms.
For instance: The four-bladed "helicopter" should auto-gyro nicely. If it loses its tether the blades keep spinning and keep providing lift - in the correct direction even. By transferring power from one blade to another as needed you can navigate it like a glider - even upwind, trading altitude for blade momentum as you drop. This lets you fly it to a landing area, landing vertically and quite gently, even without any additional power source onboard. Or find an updraft and soar until any crummy weather at ground level has moved on.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Perhaps you are neglecting the Butterfly Effect."
I am not. I have a degree in Mathematics in which I made a particular study of chaotic dynamical systems. I've written papers about the Butterfly effect; I've constructed physical models that demonstrate it. Let me tell you about the Butterfly Effect, so that you can refrain from bringing it up in discussions such as this in the future:
In a system which exhibits sensitive dependence on initial conditions (such as the weather), you cannot predict the details of long-term behavior (will there be a tornado in Iowa exactly 1 year from today) because tiny variations, well below what your measurement of the system could possibly account for (such as the breeze generated by the flapping of butterfly wings) will cause reality to drift further and further out of synch with your model until there is no resemblance on the detail level.
So the butterfly effect makes it impossible to ever predict what day it will rain months in advance, for example. But it does not prevent predictions about the aggregate, macroscopic behaviour of the system as a whole. In Meterological terms, long term weather prediction is impossible, but short-to-mid term climate prediction is easy.
Lets be ridiculously generous, and say this system takes a thousanth of a percent of the wind energy in the jet stream out. Is it reasonable to suppose this might cause significant changes in the world climate that will make a huge difference in its suitability for humans? No; it is not remotely reasonable. It's just not enough energy to make much difference.
Would it mean sometime in the future there will be a thunderstorm one day and not another? Absolutely. Whether you exhale the next breath you take slowly or forcefully means exactly the same thing; the minute difference in the velocity of a few thousand molecules of air your breathing pattern makes will eventually mean the difference in what day you get a thunderstorm.
The relevance of the Butterfly Effect in deciding whether to build this wind farm is the same as its relevance in deciding how forcefully to exhale your next breath. It means that the exact effect of either cannot be predicted, and that's it. It's not a reason to not do anything. (Well, except things like attempting long term prediction of weather detail.)
Hope that helps.
Um, no it doesn't. Just because you made a stupid mistake doesn't mean you shouldn't call out your neighbors when they repeat your stupid mistake. We (the USA) made our mistakes decades or even generations ago; other countries should be acting smart and learning from our mistakes, not acting stupid and repeating them.
Your argument is like saying the US shouldn't speak out against slavery in other countries just because we had slavery here 150 years ago. Taken to an extreme, this means no one can criticize anything anyone ever does, because everyone has some ancestor (or ancestor of their other countrymen, since so many Americans now are recent immigrants, or 1st or 2nd generation) who has done something horrible.
Hmmm, I was under the impression real turbines didn't get very close to the theoretical maximums at all. But OK, let's call it 60% of the air that passes through the swept area, and let's call that swept area something ridiculously big, like 100,000 square meters (about 25 football fields). With just the core, fastest winds of the jet stream being about 300 miles wide by 3 miles thick, that will extract, by my calculations, 0.0026% of the total energy. I'm not worried.
Without keeping it in mind.
I see a big difference between 'you are making a mistake' and 'you will regret what you are doing because...'.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
This doesn't mesh well with the personal flying cars we will all be flying in the future. The Jetsons and Futurama never had to deal with these flying windmill contraptions.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
I think this is really cool. =)
Analogously, Slashdot could be seen as being a little like a website for other cultural groups using the tag line - "New
It seems to me that there could be problems (although unlikely). For example, if there were a large enough windmill farm taking 1/50 of a percent of the jetstream wind energy (for some geogrphical area/range), that may be an energy threshold that prevents the stream from picking up enough moisture to move 5% of the precipitation around. That could be disastrous, depending on where it happened. I have no idea how much of our moisture (or heat for that matter) gets moved around by the jetstream, so this is really just wild speculation, but it does seem like a potential, though unlikely, problem.
I'd just like to thank everyone who modded this funny.
There's nothing more pathetic than the geek who can't spot junk science.
The only way our planet could healthily support more people at a decent standard of living is for everyone to live peacefully in arcologies or other high-density utopian environments. The only way this will happen is if scientists can genetically modify all future humans to no longer be human: to not fight, to not be greedy or evil, to not be intolerant or force others to yield to their will, etc.
A little pent-up angst there? Arcologies are glorified condos. Make them nice enough and people will want to live in them. Everyone? Of course not. But enough that there could be more people than today but less ecological harm. Remember, people don't need to be prodded to live close to each other. That's why there are cities and why the biggest concentrations of rich people occur in cities of insanely high population density (Tokyo, Monaco, NYC). The challenge is just to harness the good parts of living densely (variety, convenience, returns to scale, etc.) while controlling the bad parts (attractiveness to criminals, incivility, noise, etc.)
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
The challenge is just to harness the good parts of living densely (variety, convenience, returns to scale, etc.) while controlling the bad parts (attractiveness to criminals, incivility, noise, etc.)
I'm not sure how they do that in those high-cost areas you mention (Tokyo, Monaco, NYC), although I'd be interested to find out. Here in my middle-class subdivision where houses cost a measly $250k, it seems that people just can't stand to be quiet, and have to make all the noise they possibly can, whether with brain-damaged dogs which bark for hours, or motorcycles with no mufflers. I know that in the higher-end subdivisions ($600k+ perhaps), highly restrictive HOAs are the norm, and they hand out fines for the slightest bad behavior. But I didn't think they had HOAs in high-density places like NYC, so I'm really curious what exactly keeps neighbors from blasting their stereos or keeping noisy dogs. Or do they just put up with it?
Personally, I've had it with neighbors, and once I'm able to make a decent living working at home (consulting), I'm moving out to the woods, so the only noise I have to listen to is birds and crickets. Pent-up angst? I don't think there's anything wrong with being sick of stupid, noisy neighbors and wanting to move away from them.
As for prodding people, most people don't live in cities just because they like it. They (and I) live there because that's where the jobs are. Companies locate to population centers, because people learned the pitfalls of the "company town" back in the 1800s, and because the people are there. Since most people aren't independently wealthy, their job is their first consideration when finding a home. Rich people probably congregate in certain places because that's also where their jobs are; I'm pretty sure most of these people aren't "idle rich", they're professionals working in finance or whatever, so they can't very well live in North Dakota and continue to have an income. But of course, they live in a part of the city where other rich people live, so they don't have to live around all the poor people and their problems. As more people make careers which don't require a physical presence (thanks to the internet), look for people to start leaving cities.
If we take the kinetic energy out of the wind and transform it into electrical energy, will this cause any problems? If we do so on a major scale?
That's okay, via global warming we heated up the Earth to make the atmosphere more active just for this. All part of the plan...
Table-ized A.I.
Kite Wind Generator
QuickTime movie of the concept
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Just wanted to drop by and say that was a great post.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
The MARS system seems a whole lot of a better alternative. Check it out, you guys might like that.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
...but if you were heading into a dive, wouldn't the opposite wind pressure drive the propeller into a counter-productive direction simply to startup the engine(?); so even once you're engine started, you'd still have to reverse the blades for them to be useful for one's own safety?
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Although I posted that as a joke, and apparently my humor was too deadpan, your response ain't the hot snot on a golden platter that you seem to think it is. All you did was restate your original premise with no supporting evidence - "No it is not remotely reasonable. It's just not enough energy to make a difference."
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Why couldn't balloons be used to hold the weight of the tether AND the generators? This way, power isn't being wasted in keeping everything up there.
Sky WindPower? Argh. In the solar industry in California there is PowerLight, SunPower, Sun Light and Power, Sun Power and Geothermal... Just to name a few. I was hoping there would be more interesting names from now on in the alternative energy biz.
1. Repeal Second Law of Thermodynamics
2. ????
3. Profit!
and go "what the fuck?"?
Interesting anti-terror benefits as well - with a couple of these things in the air it's going to be real bitch to get a plane close. Unless you use what's already in the air, of course..
Insert
This article from 2000 talks about an Australian called Bryan Roberts http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16722574.800 -reach-for-the-sky.html. It didn't seem to go anywhere when it was first mooted.
It's a crazy idea, identical to the one cited above, but is about the most practical and practible idea going - the only serious objection is "what if a plane crashes into the tether".
You're thinking of the Laffer Curve, and it's been mostly discredited in the economics world AFAIK
"Perhaps you are neglecting the Butterfly Effect."
I am not. I have a degree in Mathematics in which I made a particular study of chaotic dynamical systems. I've written papers about the Butterfly effect; I've constructed physical models that demonstrate it. Let me tell you about the Butterfly Effect, so that you can refrain from bringing it up in discussions such as this in the future:
One of the funniest openings to a reply I have ever read on Slashdot. You made my day 2short... thanks
So if back in 1900 someone like you applied your understanding to the world's population, that it would explode to 6,550,000,000 by 2007, what would you expect the number of thunderstorms to be? Because each person requires being backed up by several cows, chickens, pigs and rats as their food source, so for each extra person breathing in Dry Air and respirating out Moist Air -plus the food animals that person needs multiplying his number of moisture added to the atmosphere by 400% let's say- you have a worldwide increase in moisture laden air.
I would really like to know what the fellow in 1900 would have projected this extra level of moisture in the world's total atmosphere would do to Al Gore's projections, global climate change, glacier melt in addition to the weather system having an increased turbulence. My belief is like the Bible, that Like begets Like, so offhand I would think that an explosion in the number of humans would beget an explosion in the number of > thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, intermixing a weather spiking of large snow storms with extra warm days in December & January.
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
Relevance to this discussion, and to the general thrust of his post? Absolutely nothing.
The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers
My own personal opinion, opinion because I don't have the extensive scientific training to research and prove it, is that the increased moisture from all animals plus Man is conceivably more responsible for Global Climate Change than greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. And yet not totally rsponsible either. But when you add moisture from respiration to the moisture evaporating off the increased ocean surface the new total begins adding up into a real snowball from hell.
5 climate.html?th&emc=th ) are well aware that there are many such looming negative butterflies... but what really gets a bit scary is that butterflies group together to procreate new larger butterflies. Ultimately extrapolated out, this means we need to make a really big pre-emptive strike to a total zero emissions engine, not play around with half solution engines, because we cannot know the true size of the snowball. We can however feel confident that the size of this Mega manmade+natural snowball is larger than many asteroids.
The good side of my opinion is that we could design a wearable mask that would remove excess moisture from human exhale so that we could quite easily lower the amount of moisture increase, launching many positive butterflies. Or clip the wings of one major negative Butterfly named Total Respiration. From what I can tell the scientists at the conference in Brussels (New York Times article > http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/science/earth/0
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
thats probably the best slash dot comment I've ever read.
prepare the survey weasels.
At any rate, yesterday I had an inspiration for a new design engine that would run on methane. A lighter engine than now being used. I liked it enough to send an inhouse e-mail to Daimler-Chrysler asking them if they were interested. I do not have the funds to build it, or the people, or the tools, or the factory, or the trained machinists, or the hmm. I guess I don't have much. I have posts on SlashDot. hahahaha I'm rich in SlashDot posts and e-mails. Wow. I feel like I've gone to plaid. Anywho, my methane engine would rid the world of methane if any car companies think that would be desirable, to make an EPA-compatible engine. I don't suppose combusted methane would leave much pollution in the air so the car might not need any heavy catalytic converters, maybe not even a tailpipe.
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
I got the joke (same sense of humor) but am glad for the misunderstanding because the response was really informative.
"I'm not good. I'm not nice. I'm just right."
But essentially you are increasing the insulation between different regions. If you imagine a tube filled with air, and you heat one end, you will get some air flow between the two. If it is not insulated and you have a constant amount of heat, it will eventually reach a steady state with some temperature difference between the two ends. Now if you block some of the air you will be able to increase the steady state temperature difference between the two. Any idea on how to calculate what removing the wind energy will do to the temperature differences on Earth?
One thing all the media hype fails to really point out, is that this is a first for self-sustaining floating platforms. The potential for a massive, relatively heavy platform that can 'float freely' in the air is really an untapped medium for commercial applications of all types.
And not to sound too, "one day we'll all be driving clean, fuel efficient nuclear cars" -- but once you can place very large turbines at the altitude where massive amounts of air are moving - it isn't going to be too far fetched to see some engineers and dreamers trying to correct CO2, Ozone, and general pollution problems using similar technology.
I remember reading, way way back about how "We can't just release Ozone from airplanes because it would take too many flights and airplanes don't fly at a high enough altitude". Imagine now if you could have a mini-power station, on a massive air-born platform generating and spewing out ozone.
My big question is, how will these tethered 'generating stations' handle the power differential between those high up clouds and the earth. It seems like they're focusing right now on 'generated electricity' without considering the inevitable (and potentially valuable) power spikes they will get from charged clouds and air-current, traveling down that tether.
Another question would be, theoretically speaking - if we had tonnes of these things floating high above the earth, would lightening discharges diminish - and then, would ozone creation actually diminish? I think the potential here could be a very hot topic for engineers for decades to come.
---
Now this is a hot topic
Ace
And Helmholtz
So don't hold your breath.
Maybe if those 200 million wanted to consume like Al Gore while having enough forest to buy carbon offsets. But there are plenty of countries with a perfectly good lifestyle that don't consume anywhere near as much as the average American, let alone the wealthiest. The United Kingdom is currently running at requiring just under 6ha per person. The planet has 11.2 billion hectares biologically sustainable. That's 1.8 billion people, all living at UK standards. Even US standards would sustain over 1 billion. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?conten t=national_footprints.
Carbon nanotubes. They're strong , lightweight, and conduct well, perfect for the cables. Also, why not put some solar panels on the generators as well? Seems like you'd be above most of the clouds.
I know you tried to "nerd serve" that guy, but all you did was make yourself sound like a (well informed) jerk.
What about the birds that use the jetstreams for migration? Would there not be a chance for their paths to be disturbed? I remember there was a problem with a wind farm in California that had to stop operations because the windmills kept killing off the local bat population.
Interesting ideas, all, but access to the jet stream is a big deal requiring big bucks. I'm wondering about small projects.
When I was a kid, I got one of those big, plastic "bat" kites. (They were new on the U.S. toy market at the time, so that tells you how old I am.) I found it horrifically unstable, so I attached a tail made of torn cloth and other stuff. It was quite long and weighed several pounds, making the kite a pain to launch. Once it had gained some altitude, though, it was stable and pulled steadily. I ran out of kite twine, so I drove a stake in the ground and tied it off. Then I rooted around in the garage and found a giant spool of 100lb test fishing line. (Why we had it since it had been years since we'd lived near the Gulf Coast and gone offshore fishing, I didn't know.) I attached this new line to the kite string and let it play out. Quick as a wink, that kite was hundreds of yards high, just hanging there, pulling hard and steady. My older sis had a party that night and all the high school boys wanted to show off how manly they were, so they pulled in the kite for me. They had to work hard for over an hour, pulling it in as fast as they could, to get it to the ground. They were tired, sweaty, and pissed at me by the time they were finished.
I haven't thought about that episode in years. I wonder, though, if it would be possible to put up a fairly large kite to an altitude of just a few hundred yards and keep it aloft (semi-)long term with some sort of small wind generator hanging from it (I know that kite I launched in my youth could have held up 20 or 30 pounds, easily, once it was in the air.) and a small cable leading back to the ground. I live in a fairly mild climate and could pull it in if the weather got bad. I'm just wondering if this could produce enough energy to bank to some batteries that the exercise would be worthwhile.
I know lots of people have tried to go off the grid using power generated from small, often home-built terrestrial windmills. Because the wind at ground level is capricious, they need to feed big battery banks to tide them over the inevitable down time. I'm just wondering if putting a small windmill up at an altitude where air movement is more reliable could actually be a workable approach to the problem.
Of course, this is all just an unformed idea from someone who knows nothing about this stuff. For all I know, the wind at 1000 feet is no more reliable than the wind at ground level and that's why TFA is talking about getting up into the jet stream. Still, it's an intriguing idea to me.
So who wants to be the first to shoot it down?
(Yes, I love bad puns, too.)
... if only he'd patented "electricity-generating kite"!
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
I don't really care if you've writen papers on the Butterfly Effect. You don't seem to understand what could happen.
Suppose that you alter the condidtions so that instead of a thunderstorm taking place 365 days from now, it takes place 366 days from now. Don't think that's much of a difference? Tell that to the farmer who's crop failed b/c it didn't rain soon enough. So not only did you alter the day when the thunderstorm takes place, but you've killed an entire crop, which means the farmer will go bankrupt and 100's of people will starve, big corporations will buy up the farmer's land, and food prices will rise which will slow down the economy and bring about the next depression. All of this b/c it didn't rain soon enough, b/c you didn't properly understand the Butterfly Effect. You should be ashamed, you've not only runined countless lives, you've actually killed the people who starved to death.
I am just outraged!
Someone's bitter!
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
For the record, I wasn't sure if your original post was a joke or not, but it didn't matter. I simply found it amusing that someone was trying to give me a helpful pointer to a wikipedia article I could easily have written. There is no way you could have known I was actually more than passingly familiar with the butterfly effect, so I hope you didn't take any personal offense. The Butterfly Effect is widely misunderstood, so I thought your post would make a fun jumping-off point to expound on a topic I know something about and find interesting.
I did not intend in that post to lend support to my original conclusion, but only to rebut your apparent sugestion that the Butterfly Effect was relevant to the discussion at hand. The butterfly effect means you cannot make good predictions about the detail behaviours of chaotic systems. It does not mean you cannot make macroscopic assesments of the range of possible future behaviors. It is still entirely reasonable to say that if the total energy you take out of the wind is small enough, you need not worry about the long term effects. I certainly don't worry before I go fly a kite with my daughter, for example.
So you are quite right that I have yet to provide any evidence for my contention that the total energy taken is negligible in this case. Let us consider it: The best wind turbines extract something like half the energy of the wind that passes through their swept area. According to the first source I could find, the very core, fastest winds of the jet stream form a layer 3 miles deep by 300 miles wide. So, by my calculations, a turbine the size of a football field will extract about 0.00001% of the energy in those winds.
I remain unworried.
What you said about the Butterfly Effect is correct but deals with the impact of small random fluctuations on a chaotic system. In this situation the planned alteration is highly non-random (a consistent reduction in energy potential of the jetstream), and the inevitable consequence of success is a gradual and significant increase in the magnitude of the change. The Butterfly Effect is not the correct model for non-random state changes of increasing magnitude.
In other words, the quoted person is thinking about a valid concern, but used the wrong model to express it. The concern is still valid however. Will our actions disturb a delicate balance in nature of which we are not yet aware? We just don't know. Experiments of this scope are not the ones that you want to go the wrong way, so I sincerely hope that this company and the government spends as much time determining how to calculate the limit of what we allow ourselves to pull from the jetstream as we do figuring out how to do it.
Oooh!!! What now, Jah-Wren Ryel!?!? 2short just took your shit and rubbed all up against your grill! You gonna let the muthafucka do that shit to ya, man? You just got ho-slapped with a side of milk, son. Don't bring that weak shit no mo'. Dis be 2short's house now, biatch!
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
By necessity, any generation of electricity is going to remove energy from our environment somehow.
What about solar? By using solar cells you're absorbing energy that would otherwise be reflected out into space, where it has no impact on our environment. Your basic point stands nonetheless.Was the science of renegade Tesla whom worked way beyond mainstream science but ended up coming up with the Alternator that powers our cities and radio waves that are used not just for radio but for TV systems and communications, also junk science?
I suppose if you had lived in the time of gallileo, you would have also said his theory of the Earth rotating around the Sun to be herecy!
The only junk is in the closed mind of an individual unwilling to look at overwhelming evidence and follow like lemmings the status quo.
Quantum theory already allows for Zero Point Gravity to be a reality, only the mechanics to manipulate it are not yet invented by mainstream science.
It's like they say, "a closed mind, is a good thing to lose".
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
I wonder if they are going to use space elevator for installing these turbines.
..... best things in life are not so free..........
Think HIGHER! The wind gets faster as you go higher. As the seventh root of altitude... The Sun (our OmniCapitalist) propels the winds. Think of a 5 kilometer dome built by simple robots connecting carbon nanotube fibers. Now attach a billion turbines onto the dome. So we put this dome in a desert, and wallah- power for the united states. As a final thought, I'd make sure to include a few lightning rods. Realism is Real. Optimism is healthy.
Actually, I tried to expound upon a topic I know a bit about and find interesting. I intended to use the guy's presumably off-the-cuff remark as a somewhat amusing jumping off point to correct a fairly common misunderstanding. I'm sorry if you, he, or anyone misunderstood that intent.
"Nerds" (such as myself) frequently have difficulty in that they sound like jerks when they correct others, while in reality, we are simply well-informed, and enjoy sharing our well-informedness with others. In most social situations, being nice is considered more important than being correct. Much of the fun of hanging out (virtually at least) in places like Slashdot that are dominated by like-minded nerds, is being free to concentrate on being right, and not having to worry so much if anyone thinks you're a jerk. So, I don't think I'm a jerk, and I kind of hope you don't. But, nothing personal, I mostly don't give a damn.
The Laffer Curve is real, but liberals don't "believe" in it. Ergo, they must not believe in turbines either.
This sounds like something straight out of a Miyazaki movie.
I fail to see how sticking a helicopter 10km up in the jet-stream is going to be competitive with drilling a hole 4 kilometers down for a geothermal plant. We already have technology to do the latter yet that isn't of interest to power companies so I really doubt a wacky scheme like this is going to have more success.