Slashdot Mirror
Jet Stream Kites Could Power New York City
Damien1972 writes to tell us that researchers from the Carnegie Institution and California State University claim that a fleet of kites could harvest enough energy to run New York and other major cities, especially if they are affected by polar jet streams. "Using 28 years of data from the National Center for Environmental Prediction and the Department of Energy, Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology and Cristina Archer of California State University, Chico compiled the first global survey of wind energy available at high altitudes in the atmosphere. They found that the regions best suited for harvesting this energy align with population centers in the eastern U.S. and East Asia, although they note that 'fluctuating wind strength still presents a challenge for exploiting this energy source on a large scale.'"
Monorail
Maybe this will finally rid Florida of the lightning capital of the world title.
:-P
Ben Franklin, eat your heart out.
Great defense against incoming jetliners as the kites get sucked into engines, either from terrorists or major campaign donors out for a spin in Air Force One.
It'll be like the ending of Mary Poppins, only it never ends! Let's go fly a kite, up to the highest height...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How many planes will this thing bring down?
But first off, where are we going to get the money to start buying kites? No doubt a fleet of electricity generating kites are going to cost a pretty penny. Second, why would you invest in a new technology when there are other (probably more-efficient) green technologies. Now isn't the time to start innovating from scratch with the global recession. Lastly, where are going to put them, in the plains of the Midwest? What happens when the kites start interfering with birds and such?
It's a nice idea in theory, but not practical (at least for now).
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
New York already has the most congested airways in the country, and possibly in the world. If these kites are at 30,000 feet, and most commercial airplanes fly around 35,000 feet, how are we not going to have a bunch of severed kites everywhere?
Or is this just "Let's Dream a Dream" Day on Slashdot?
I don't suppose it occurred to them that the Eastern seaboard is also among the most congested airspace on Earth? Planes already have enough issues hitting birds. Solar thermal stations Solar Power satellites are the way to go, to deserted areas, with long haul transmission lines to population centers. Heck, if you wanted to you could do both, the waste absorbed energy in the atmosphere would probably make for some pretty consistent winds.
With 2K for turbines and wires,
we can build a generating flyer.
With a line to the ground,
it's a turbine in flight!
With a bolt holding tight
to the string of the kite!
Let's go fly a kite
Up to the highest height
Let's go fly a kite
And send it soaring
Up through the atmosphere
Up where the air is clear
Oh, let's go fly a kite!
I am officially gone from
Why do need renewable, unAMERICAN, Terroristic, energy sources when we can keep burning coal and sticking it Mother Earth, the slut.
Got me thinkin'.
I suppose the "fluctuating flow" problem could be circumvented by using helium bags to get the kites aloft initially, combined with a spooled tether.
When the jet-stream is coming close, the bags are filled and the kite spooled to the proper altitude. Once the jet-stream is sufficient to keep the kite aloft, the bags are deflated and stowed. When the jet-stream is predicted to be moving out of the area, the bags are re-inflated until there is no more reason to keep it aloft, at which time it spooled back in.
Have any of these jackasses considered the consequences of removing all this kinetic energy from those streams? What happens when you harness all that energy and slow down that wind? I'm no genius, but I'm betting the results could be very very bad.
Even over the best areas, the wind can be expected to fail about five percent of the time.
The heck with backup power sources -- who covers the liability when 6 miles of power-transmitting cable come crashing to the ground? And how much wind does it take to support the weight of 6 mile long high voltage wire?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
A kite which can support a 30,000 foot electric line? I'm thinking there are some serious engineering challenges there. Probably involving unobtanium and other exotic materials.
What happens when you pull that much energy out of the jetstream? Does it change global air circulation? Do you get climate changes throughout the world?
http://www.makanipower.com/
I see comment after comment like "What about teh airplanzes!?!" but such comments come from a severe lack of understanding of controlled airspace.
See, while it's true that the Eastern seaboard is one of the busiest airspaces in the world, it's also one of the most tightly controlled. Airspace is commonly restricted to 18,000 feet, above which *all* airspace is controlled. (It's called "class A(lpha) airspace at/above 18,000 ft) The only effect this would have on air traffic is that ATC would redirect commercial flights around the kites, which isn't particularly hard to do.
As a pilot myself, I've many times been diverted around hazards such as other planes, mountains, and even UAVs. (Un-manned Aeronautical vehicles, being tested by the military)
And obviously, these wouldn't be assembled on the instrument approach path for O'Hare airport. This makes the whole "Teh planezes are fallingz" as exciting a story as "Teh Internetz iz failingz" due to lack of router memory.
In short, it's just not a significant issue.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Seriously what would happen if we start removing all this kinetic energy from the atmosphere. I know we have been doing it with windmills but have we studied the effects of those windmills? Up till now we have been removing a trifling amount of energy and all we draw may prove to be a trifling amount but what if it isn't. Do we start having fewer and gentler storms causing currents in the ocean to not do what they do or do we lose the ability of that wind somewhere else to pollinate a field? Seriously I don't think it's been thought out any more than "What do we do when the oil runs out" was 100 years ago.
Why bother
Launch a solar panel and beam the energy down to earth.
I am asking because if you had, you would be laughing like I am right now. Powerful winds tear through everything that has even the tiniest bit of slack. At ground level. Tarps rip to pieces, grommets are completely useless. Shelters fly away into the playa, women's clothes break free and take on their own. Oh, well, I am getting distracted.
TFA's description is much more vague than ones I've seen in science fiction.
Several technologies have been proposed to harvest these high altitude winds, including tethered, kite-like turbines that would be floated to the altitude of the jet streams at an altitude of 20,000-50,000 feet and transmit up to 40 megawatts of electricity to the ground via the tether.
Well, I am proposing building flying cities maintained by giant robots. We can use the high altitude, jets streams and clear skies to harvest clear solar and wind energy.
Here's my proof of concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_in_the_Sky
I heard the kites were shaped like pies.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Go ahead, build the lightest turbine you can, then tether it with the lightest 20,000-foot-long cable you can make that can transmit the electricty, and you won't be anywhere NEAR an amount of weight you can lift with anything short of a MASSIVE thinwing glider, which will catch the wind wrong for a second, the lift will slide off the wings and it will death-spiral along with that cable, beelining for a residential neighborhood near you.
Even if they had micro-nanotubes that could support the weight and deliver the power, or wireless power, or whatever, you'd still have mechanical failures and huge turbines plummeting into buildings (or ships if you put them over water).
This gets proposed every year somwhere, and it's just as dumb. There are a lot of good ideas out there and it's somewhat infuriating that perpetual-motion machines and microwave diamonds keep getting the attention.
Science journalists need to start INVESTIGATING things, not just mindlessly reporting the same nonsense every year.
Won't these slow the rotation of the earth?
(looks up patent on "Leyden Jar")
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
If you could assure your investors and insurers that you'd never be at risk for severe storm damage, I could see flying a kite at that altitude.
Once. You might keep it up there for three months, maybe six. And then a storm comes along with a change in wind direction that exceeds your tolerances, and you have wounded duck hurtling down to knock some heads. The conditions that would disrupt your kite and potentially bring it down would be the same conditions you would NOT allow an inflated balloon to be in, the only thing that would keep it from reaching terminal velocity.
You might be able to launch a balloon that runs above everything, to say 45,000', but I doubt the amount of lift that would provide -- perhaps someone can run the numbers.
You could call the first one launched "The Sword Of Damocles"!
NIMBY turns into NAMH (Not Above My Head)
Why don't we just get a really long extension cord and plug it into the sun?
Do any of these kite-engineers know how much a wind turbine and generator WEIGH? We're talking hundreds of tons. Please point to a kite that can lift 1% of that. Now go play with your kites and leave us alone.
if you're putting kites that high, make their strings metallic and try to get some power from the electrical difference. you're mitigating lightning by giving it a pre-set path where it doesn't have to get such a large charge before it can jump.
or just put your kites underwater, where the water's thicker than the air, and the tides more predictable. i'd make em more like wind-socks tho.
at http://www.makanipower.com/. They already have prototypes built.
I don't know for certain, but I think it involves a portly Philadelphian and a key...
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
...it sounds a lot like a kitedream!
The power is generated on the ground. The kite simply moves cables in a circular or figure-8 pattern.
Why does everyone assume they have found the show stopping problem that the people who have been working on this for years have overlooked? These people aren't amateur inventors asking for start-up capital. This system is well researched and proven to work (although I'm not sure there are any test sites working at jet stream altitudes, yet). The problem with airplanes is trivial - no-fly zones aren't exactly a new invention.
and people do work on stupid idea's for years, it's where lots of grant moneys goes.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
TFA speaks about 20000-50000 feet. How do you get that much tether, and a kite big enough to hold it, up that high? Do you start with the tether attached to the ground or the kite?
With the news that the winds are dying down?
http://www.livescience.com/environment/etc/090610-winds-are-dying-down-study-suggests.html
Oh well....I guess they could always fly them over Washington, DC.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Wind power isn't cheap. The cost of maintenance on hundreds of generators over thousands of square miles alone spikes the cost. The most efficient wind farms only produce 41% percent capacity. I doubt you can find a place that the jet stream lingers over long enough to make this idea feasible even if it was cheap.
The Hindenburg was well researched and proven to work. So were Challenger and Columbia -- no one is perfect.
/. in particular) is good at is crowdsourcing problems. We all have different background and experiences and it only takes one person to find the stupid, minor issue that makes an entire idea irrelevant.
We bring up issues when and where we see them, not just for fun, not just to be a part of the discussion, but because that's the best way to find potential problems and avert disaster. One thing the internet (and
The power is generated on the ground. The kite simply moves cables in a circular or figure-8 pattern.
FTFA: "Several technologies have been proposed to harvest these high altitude winds, including tethered, kite-like turbines that would be floated to the altitude of the jet streams at an altitude of 20,000-50,000 feet and transmit up to 40 megawatts of electricity to the ground via the tether."
It sounds a little like they are talking about creating "kite-like turbines that would be floated to the altitude of the jet streams" ... and then they would "transmit up to 40 megawatts of electricity to the ground via the tether". I am not sure where you are getting the ground-based power generation from. It isn't mentioned anywhere in the article.
Really? Someone actually came up with this?
They've got to stop handing out so much pot in college...
The more we put energy in the atmosphere, either directly or by greenhouse gases, the worse the weather will be: more violent storms, more planes downed by catastrophically worse weather and so on.
If we take some energy out of the atmosphere and prevent more greenhouse gases to be released as a side effect, I am all in.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Um, they could have threatened nuclear war for violating the UN charter.
My god, I haven't laughed so hard in days.
Are they going to launch a strike from the secret UN base in a dormant volcano? Or perhaps the huge fleet of UN satellites in orbit armed to the teeth and ready to pounce on the slightest transgression!!
If you recall, the German invasion of Belgium was enough to get the British into World War I
I was not aware the british were the UN.
likewise, the invasion of Poland started World War II in Europe.
Wow, that was started by the U.N. too? I guess the books I read were all wet! Thank god we had you along to tell us the true chronicles of Captian UN, hive-mind savior of humanity with the first strike Fist Of Great Justice!
Ha!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
ZOMG oh knoes This will make the urth stop turning!
Oh how great this will be for the tiny fraction of New Yorkers in Manhattan even who pay for everything and don't look at each turn for a chance to scam. This electricity will only be useful really in New York, when it can be easily and conveniently stolen by the masses in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
The more things you have in the sky, the more likely something is to go wrong. Every now and then one will break due to age and/or gusts, get crashed into by a dumb bird, etc, and come tumbling down. With a large volume of them, the accident rate is going to be fairly high. Most will probably just harmless careen into the side of a building breaking a window or two, but some will cause traffic accidents or directly impact somebody.
Table-ized A.I.
i've seen the nat geo show on this, they spent decades trying to get these things to work. one guy built a blowup version, sent 10's of thousands on it only to have it fail. it's great is you just ignore small details like oh say, what happens when one breaks loose. it is after all in the jet stream under pretty extreme conditions.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The atmospheric pressure at 30-40K feet is around 200 millibars, basically the air is only 20% as dense as it is at the surface (~1000 millibars). So the kinetic energy available in a 120 mph wind at 30K feet is only a small fraction of what that kind of wind is at the surface. Point being, a 100+ mph wind sounds impressive, but at that altitude the kinetic energy is much less than it is at the surface.
What if we built our taller buildings in such a way that we could exploit the temperature difference between the top and the bottom of a very tall column of air? If we could somehow route the heat from the sunny side of the building to the bottom of the column, and the cooler side of the building's heat to the top, could we run turbines from the air pressure escaping from vents at the base? I'd think a half-kilometer column of air could develop a pretty fair whack of tappable kinetic energy out of nothing much more than clever convection. You could build one hell of a Stirling engine that way, too.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
How to read "scientific news" containing the word "could".
Blah-de-blah-de-blah ... (outlandish fantasy) ... blah de blah".
This is *not* news, it is stupid fantasy speculation.
No. In the grand scheme of things, the Security Council could have voted to kick the USA out of the UN and demand a withdrawal from Iraq.
Even if it weren't for the veto other people mentioned, just where do you think the U.N. gets most of the funding from?
You are basically saying the son would be able to oust the parents from the house because he was unhappy with the parents. Massive Chuckles!
I just wish people could see, is that, what George W Bush did was remarkable, in that, he started a war and got away with it, really, through sheer intimidation
Kind of the point. Also, you misspelled "determination". And that said determination was on the part of not just Bush but also the military commanders in charge of Iraq (eventually). It's an amazing success story in the face of all odds, true enough... but you seem to think that's a bad thing that a whole nation gets to actually have the freedom so many other middle eastern countries deny from above (compare Iraq's multiple elections to Iran).
Shame you can't see the costs of lacking any kind of ability to intimidate. But we'll all learn that over the next few years, and the cycle can begin anew.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What happens when a jet stream stops or significantly weakens from years of power extraction?
Earth's rotation goes haywire?
Severe weather anomalies?
"The problem with airplanes is trivial - no-fly zones aren't exactly a new invention."
Quick! Someone file me a patent for a no-fly zone specifically for the purpose of electricity generating kites!
any one else think it said KIKES?
Birds seem to be pretty good at not flying into power wires, trees and other objects. It's almost as if they have eyes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
America circa 1960 was "OMG Soviets!". Hoover basically allowed people to get lynched and let millions of people go without voting rights because they thought the civil rights movement was controlled by commies. Then there was a little thing called 'vietnam', and 'the cuban missile crisis', and the congo, and chile, and indonesia, and ... oh yeah even this funny place.. Iran? yes thats the name.
The reason we went to the moon was because of the COLD WAR. no cold war, NO MOON TRIP. get it? yeah a lot of people love the 'spirit of adventure' but no government is going to write a check for a few billion taxpayer dollars for ten+ years unless there is some serious national issue behind it. and they didn't. read up assholes, it's called "history books".. they sell them online i think.
And as for all the dipshits who voted this 'insightful', you fuckers read THREE HISTORY BOOKS EACH. i would recommend that one that gives the russian side of the sputnik story by interviewing people that knew korolev.
ok - what happens with 6 miles of high tensile wire comes crashing down?
It's been a long time, but if I remember correctly you use it to set a bunch of killer sunflowers on fire?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
...who read the headline as "Jet Stream Kittens to Power New York City"?
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Its as if the pull this crap from the clear blue. Anything - anything to stop using oil. http://www.discussglobalwarming.com/blog and http://www.junkscience.com has all the facts on the global warming hoax.
And how much wind does it take to support the weight of 6 mile long high voltage wire?
None. You dispense with the kites and hang the turbines off the space elevator.
Only if you are in Larry Niven's Ringworld. I must have subconsciously remembered that story when I brought up that scenario.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
TFA mentioned none of this. Peddle your outrage at the original poster and the idiot who let the summary through.
Am I the
only one
Who see
his
comments
like this?
There are a few other people who are commenting the same way that I have seen. Is it some html edit that is missing? Scrolling down all that way to read a 10-11 character wide column is a really annoying. Or is that what you were going for?
that's why we need wireless power!
funny sig, by the way
weinersmith
You won your little game by changing to a completely different argument to move the goalpost so you can stop poking sticks at us poor technical folk that you appear to think are completely interchangable. I'm an engineer (coal and oil exploration) not a climate scientist.
If we get back to the original discussion a few kites taking say 10% of the velocity of the wind that hits them would mean you would need a HUGE area of kites to notice anything a hundred miles downwind. Consider that you can not put a dam in the sky and the wind will go around things that slow it down a lot. Consider mountains, trees, cities and what that does to the wind. Now do you get some idea of what sort of as scales we are talking about and why nobody considers the prospect of a few hundred kites a threat to the gulf stream?
Global warming has nothing to do with really simple discussions of airflow. If you want to keep pushing the comparisons think of the scale of a few centuries of industrialisation burning incredible amounts of coal and oil. However that's what you really wanted to talk about isn't it? You want to make fun of the technical folk and pretend you are smarter because there was a cold day last week, and argue against any sort of progress. Well IMHO the global warming "debate" appeared to be over in the late 1980s and it's only recently that we've had various fruitcakes scraping for anything to try to prove it wrong because it's easy to say "it was cold last Tuesday, that means Scientists and educated clergy are stupid so come to my big tent medicine and Jesus show instead". I don't know if I can tell such folk any truth of any kind that will be believed even if their lives depend upon it - but they may have children which will give us a brighter future.
This will make terrorism so much easier and more accessible to the general disgruntled public. You can go to almost any store and just buy a pair of siccors to exact your revenge against the oppressors!
Consider mountains, trees, cities and what that does to the wind.
Yes, all of those things have a big effect on wind, but none of them are designed to efficiently pull massive amounts of energy out of the wind. To a large extent, they just channel and redirect the wind.
Anyway, settle down. I'm not trying to argue that global warming isn't happening. I'm saying, imagine going back in time to when people started burning coal and oil and telling them, "the vapors from burning that stuff might eventually cause massive environmental problems." They'd think you're crazy, because the world is so big and it's just a tiny little bit of vapor.
And now you're telling me that sucking massive amounts of energy out of the jetstream can't possibly have environmental impact. That's nice of you to say, and I'm sure you must be right because you're an engineer, and engineers know everything. On the other hand, I'll hold onto my questions and concerns, given that sometimes people are wrong, especially when modeling something as complex as the global climate.
The impact of a few kites on the airflow is likely to be extremely minor in comparison to that of buildings etc, especially since if you had them too close together and it slowed the wind down too much then more wind would just go around. I'm not arguing in the stupid absolute of having no effect on the air flow at all as you seem to imply, merely so little effect that you lose it in the noise and wouldn't know some miles downstream that anything was disturbing the airflow.
I think I see the core of the misunderstanding:
The problem here is really that nothing is designed to efficiently pull massive amounts of energy out of the wind - you can only get so much work out with a turbine, then if you are lucky you can then run it through another turbine that works better at another speed but the majority of the energy in the moving fluid still gets through. These things work because there is simply so much fluid moving that getting 10% of the energy out is a big deal.
Also get the "complex climate modelling thing" out of your head and instead consider these things at face value, they would slow down the wind in the local area and nothing else, so you work that out and plug that into a "complex climate modelling thing" later if it is significant. This is a one dimensional problem, air comes in, does work, comes out. If you try to get it to do too much work most of the air goes around.
I'm surprised I'm spending so much time defending something that will probably never be implemented or the prototype will blow away in the first big storm (and I don't think is a really good idea anyway), but this really is one of those "how high is the sky" questions where recent education fails us badly. I can rephrase your question as "how many sneezes will it take to stop a hurricane" to give you an idea of how many kites with turbines we would need to slow down the jet stream noticably - that's what I mean by a question of scale. These things would just be a windmill farm high in the sky instead of on the beach with all the added complications as a trade off for a reliable and faster wind. It would not be a wall in the sky - obstruct too much and the wind goes around.
I can rephrase your question as "how many sneezes will it take to stop a hurricane" to give you an idea of how many kites with turbines we would need to slow down the jet stream noticably - that's what I mean by a question of scale.
And I might rephrase your question as "how many lanterns would it take to cause global warming?" It would obviously take an insanely high number. But then figure out how many people there are on this planet, and multiply that by how much energy the average person is using. That's an insanely high number.
So how sure are you, that if you could combine and direct the force of everyone on the planet sneezing at once, how sure are you that we couldn't stop or divert a hurricane?
You are arguing about the analogy here but hopefully you are getting the point that insanely large numbers are involved (and yes I'm pretty sure it would take more than five billion people and the horses they rode in on since we are talking about orders of magnitude). It's not about slowing down the gulf stream by 10% it's about slowing down less than millionth of a percent of the gulf stream down by ten percent.
I'm not arguing about the analogy here. Did you notice that I didn't go into mathematics about the estimated force generated by the entire earth sneezing? That's because I don't actually care about your metaphor.
My point is you're using the logic of "Well, it's just one instance of someone doing something small, and that can't *possibly* have any effect." And I'm saying, "yeah, but lots of people doing lots of small things can add up." We're finding that you don't have to change the chemical makeup of the atmosphere very much to have an adverse affect. All those graphs where CO2 levels are going off the charts? Look at the scales on those charts-- CO2 increase in the atmosphere has been something like 0.005%, and we're all flipping out.
So if you're so smart, you tell me: exactly how much solar energy can we pull out of what hits the earth before we have a measurable effect? Exactly how much wind energy can we pull out of the jet stream before it makes a difference? Give me some really precise numbers on how much energy we'll be pulling out, and how much energy it will take.
And when you're done, explain how you figured that out, because apparently we don't need scientific study of these things anymore. We just need some random engineer to tell us the answers based on his little predictive model. (because we know predictive models are always so great at telling you what will actually happen)
The point you have missed here is that for a very small effect to have a large effect you have to apply it an incredible number of times which, although not impossible is incredibly unlikely.
That is why I have said in nearly every reply IT IS ALL A MATTER OF SCALE, and in this case the scale is enormous.
Please stop dragging global warming into it, it has nothing to do with my argument or yours, just as your stupid demand about solar energy numbers (you can easily look up the average amount of energy per square metre) and you still do not seem to have grasped the idea of how large the earth is and how much wind energy is spread over vast distances.
Look around you, observe and learn from what you see. Also please do not try to blow simple statements about simple things into enormous towers of philosophy that mean something else just to win an argument - you really just wanted to pick on someone about global warming didn't you to show you are smarter than all those univeristy educated folk?
you still do not seem to have grasped the idea of how large the earth is
Yeah, I get your argument. The Earth is so big and we're so small that we can't possibly have a significant effect on the environment. Except when we can, in which case a tiny little fraction of a percent change can wreak massive damage. Good grasp of logic, there.
Look, you're being silly with all your "look at me, I'm so smart because I'm university educated and an engineer!" Like that's even impressive. You think being a university graduate and engineer is rare, or puts you in some kind of special class that requires people listen to you? Look where you're discussing this-- this place is teeming with engineers.
You haven't done research in this. You're not an expert in climatology. I bet you're not even a real scientists, but I'm supposed to listen to your vague assertions about scale, when you can't even tell me how much wind energy can we pull out of the jet stream before it makes a difference?
Why don't you just admit it: you don't know, because this is not your field of expertise. All of your blustering is just you insisting that making a tiny change in something huge can't make any significant difference, in spite of the fact that real climatologists know that sometimes it can. You're saying a fraction of percent can't make a difference, but a 0.5% change in global temperature can have drastic effects, and we're all worried about a 0.005% shift in the chemical balance of our atmosphere.
I'm not a disbeliever in global warming, and if I had to guess, I'd say that we could pull a lot of energy out of the jet stream without worrying about it. On the other hand, if we're going to try to solve our energy problems by pulling it all out of our atmosphere, I'd hope that some real climatologists (not a random armchair-quarterback engineer) have tried to figure out whether that's going to cause any problems.
You are vastly overcomplicating the problem which is possibly why you cannot understand. At the point where you are considering to have millions of these things you bring in the climatologists because by then they'll be able to see effects above random noise.
All we are talking about is a few windmills in the sky. Everyone that talks about a single energy solution is selling something - barring gross corruption nobody is going to try to get all the energy we need from any single source because some things just make more sense in different locations or applications. Windmills are fairly expensive ways to get large amounts of energy anyway and require a lot of maintainance, putting them on kites adds complications and if course if you have too many close together the wind is just going to go around the barrier. I just cannot see any situation where we will have millions of the things stacked high in the sky having a big effect on local airflow let alone getting to the point where changing the weather is going to happen. It's not something that can be sensibly compared to hundreds of years of industrialisation.