Harnessing High Altitude Wind Power

jakosc writes "The Economist has an interesting article about increasing the efficiency of wind-powered generators by turning them into flying wind farms. These tethered generators would harness high speed jet stream winds above 15,000 ft and in theory could give outputs of 40MW per generator (PDF). The developer's website has more details of some of the safety, technological, and economic issues."

Comments

Re:maybe not...

[maxume]

The wind is a side effect of the atmosphere mixing. If you calculate the total amount of energy from the sun, the current human consumption of ~12 terawatts is considerably less than 1%. It's probably big enough to pay attention to, but as long as you bring the farms online a few at a time, you aren't going to do any sort of long term damage.

(sunlight reaches the earth at a rate of about 1300 W/m^2; model the earth as a big disk with a radius of ~6,000,000 meters; 1300*3.14*6000000^2 = 1.45*10^17 watts; 1 terawatt= 1*10^12 watts; 1.45*10^17 watts=145000 terawatts; 12 is 0.008% of 145000.)