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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.
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.
Update: Just for kicks, I Read The Fine Article. In it, it is estimated that 1% of the power in the jet stream would power the entirety of human civilization. Not that you'd ever get that much, but again, not a problem.
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.
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.
You're right. We should stick to burning coal, firing gas, building dams, and fissioning radioactive materials. Those have all proven to have no unintended consequences.
There already exist no-fly zones all over the place. I don't see why we couldn't just set up a perimeter around the cable as a no-fly zone and planes fly around it, like they would a military base, an erupting volcano, or other such places.
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
"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.