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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."
I do wonder: if one of those fell to the ground, what would happen? With the recent stories of space junk falling to earth, could we someday be troubled by power stations falling on us?
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
The jet stream is instumental in pushing storm systems around, but is itself a fairly stable, continuous flow at a higher altitude than the storms.
The tethers will keep these continuously grounded, so any static is just some bonus power. The teathers will be great lightning rods, which will probably be more power at once than can be made usable, but it is entirely possible to design them so it's not destructive either.
Ice build up would have to be dealt with, but, hey, it's a power station, if nothing better, heat the cable.
There are definitely technical hurdles to overcome; this is at the conceptual daydreaming stage so far. But the obvious problems seem entirely doable to me.
I'd say the big issue is if you can get reliability good enough that maintenance costs don't kill your cost effectiveness.