Kite Power: The Latest In Green Technology (thebulletin.org) 103
New submitter Dan Drollette writes: The solution to producing energy without contributing to global warming may be to go fly a kite. Literally. Researchers in Switzerland and Italy — high-altitude places where the winds are strong, steady and predictable — have been working on ways to generate electricity from kites that fly hundreds or thousands of meters high. The scientists already have a prototype cranking out 27 megawatts; they expect to have a 100-megawatt plant big enough to power 86,000 households. And they say that they can produce electricity for less that 4 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is better than fossil fuel. Plus, the kites look really cool (as does the "Darrieus rotor vertical axis wind turbine" at the base of the St Bernard Pass, on the Swiss side, which I've seen in operation in person).
Prior Art (Score:4, Informative)
I think they forgot to google for the technology first: https://www.google.com/makani/
One handed clap (Score:3)
Re:One handed clap (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the road most followed.
Even traffic lights have LEDs in them now. People who did not care about building insulation at all a few years ago have it. Roofs are being painted white. We could always do more but it is definitely not being ignored.
Re:One handed clap (Score:4, Insightful)
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http://cleantechnica.com/?s=ch... [cleantechnica.com]
http://cleantechnica.com/?s=india
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Re:One handed clap (Score:5, Informative)
Not much? Seriously?
In the 2006-2010 five year plan the real improvements in China's energy usage came from two programs.
Firstly, in the Thousand Enterprises Program the government forced China's top 1000 companies to completely rethink their energy use. They were told to monitor energy efficiency, and redesign, upgrade, and / or replace industrial equipment and software with the aim of becoming more energy efficient, reducing the amount of power they used without denting their productivity. The other program was even more drastic. Thousands of small, inefficient, factory units and assembly lines across the country were simply closed down.
The above programs were so successful (a roughly 19% cut in their energy intensity) that they were extended and expanded for the current five year plan: smaller, inefficient units are continuing to close down, and the Thousand Enterprises Program has become the Ten Thousand Enterprise Program. Current indications suggest that China has met its target of a further 16% cut in their energy intensity.
In addition, China has more installed wind power than any other country in the world, and has the second largest installed solar power capacity. I've also read that they (the Chinese government) are actively looking at new nuclear power plant designs as well as thorium salt reactor designs, which is a direct contrast to pretty much every single western government.
If all this qualifies as "not much" I'm not sure what it would take to impress...
Re:One handed clap (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if China isn't exploring new fancy nuclear designs, they currently have 26GW of generation capacity, they are bringing a further 40GW online in the immediate future (plants already under construction many of which are nearly finished), and a further 50GW of generation capacity is already planned beyond that. That's a bigger push for CO2 free energy than a lot of other countries are currently making.
Re:One handed clap (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess you just like having someone to point to and say "well, they're worse than me, so I can continue being wasteful", as you clearly haven't spent any time looking for supporting evidence.
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Re:One handed clap (Score:5, Interesting)
Most other countries have continously falling birth rates, even the so called poor ones. The average birth rate in the African countries for instance is close to 2.5 children per woman, not much higher than for instance the U.S..
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One word:
Airdrop
Re:One handed clap (Score:5, Informative)
Thus back to airbombing people with the condom: It won't affect the birth rate. Birth rates decline in all countries with rising female education levels and better health care, wether you carpet bomb them with condoms or not.
The Japanese and many others have answer (Score:2)
Just because your area has not bothered to solve it due to fragmentation of government services does not mean that they cannot solve it by simply buying the solution of of a catalogue!
It's also like arguing that solar panels are useless due to snow buildup wh
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Build far enough underground and there would be little need for air conditioning. There would be no weather problems. Driving in tunnels would be far easier as there would be no pedestrians or wildlife. Even if the costs are enormous and it take centuries to justify the expense, the savings after that would be far more than the expenses. We just need to learn from Bertha in Seattle.
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There is enough energy in, on, and above the planet to provide for current needs, and for projected needs into the arbitrary future. Wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear sources of energy can be -- and are! -- deployed more and more as energy scientists and energy engineers find ways to get to them and exploit them. There is no scarcity of energy on this planet, there is only a lack of access. So asserting that we need to use all this energy efficiently is misguided at best, and really doesn't help with
Re:Prior Art (Score:5, Interesting)
Makani uses a completely different approach: They use a wind turbine to generate electric energy and just use a kite to get the turbine to 250m height, while the kites from switzerland are basically passive kites and the aerodynamic lift is used for generation of power. Makani could generate energy contiguously while this SwissKitePower approach would alternate between ascend and retraction phases and only produce power during ascend.
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Re:At least the passive kites do not produce the h (Score:5, Insightful)
1) I've stood directly underneath a 1MW turbine in the middle of a large wind farm on a windy day. There wasn't much noise at all, just a light whoosh... whoosh... whoosh.... I don't know where this concept that wind turbines are "terribly noisy" comes from, but it doesn't at all match my experience.
2) You're concerned with noise about something that's hundreds of meters up? What about kite-based systems that operate at thousands of meters up, would you be worried about noise from them too?
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1) I've stood directly underneath a 1MW turbine in the middle of a large wind farm on a windy day. There wasn't much noise at all, just a light whoosh... whoosh... whoosh.... I don't know where this concept that wind turbines are "terribly noisy" comes from, but it doesn't at all match my experience.
I've held a megaphone in front of my mouth and spoken into it. All I heard was my own regular voice, therefore I don't believe they work as advertised. In other words, it's all about direction.
I've also been visiting a house about 1.5km(1 mile) away from the nearest wind turbine, with the noise disturbance inside the house being at such a degree that I couldn't believe our government could let this happen. When the noise hits them, the residents can't sleep and neither would you in similar circumstances.
The
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This sounds like approach SkySails uses. See from 1:50 in this video. [youtube.com]
They are the ones who make kites for large ships. (Shown at 4:20 in the same video.)
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fast winds (Score:1)
What happens if the wind stops? Do I get a free repair to my roof?
Re:fast winds (Score:5, Funny)
What happens if the wind stops?
The utility plant operators have to compensate by running backwards and pulling harder on the string.
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"US army blimp wreaks havoc after breaking free from military facility" (2015/oct/28)
http://www.theguardian.com/us-... [theguardian.com]
"... dragging its 10,000 foot long cable behind it and knocking out power to thousands."
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Re:fast winds (Score:4, Interesting)
That's part of the reason that blimps are increasingly going out of favor, in favor of hybrid airships. Hybrids are based on the concept of being aircraft (generally lifting-body aircraft) that get huge lifting areas via inflation (so that they don't need any real structural strength, and thus keep the mass very low), and use helium as the inflation gas, which partially (but not completely) lifts the craft. So you have the combination of huge lifting area and much of your weight compensated for, so it takes little energy to stay aloft (which can, for example, come from solar), and unpowered landings are perfectly safe. But because (for the same payload capacity) you don't need as big of a gas bag as with a blimp, they're not as vulnerable to crosswinds and thus not as likely to break free, as well as being much easier to land without being blown into power lines or whatnot.
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If you put it all the way up into the Jet Stream it would be pretty steady.
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At the altitude they are using there will always be enough wind to keep the thing in the sky. The amount of energy generated might vary, but it won't fall down.
Re: fast winds (Score:1)
What if the control centre is hit by a car bomb from a terrorist group? What if the kite cable is hit by a meteor? What happens if the operator discovers that magic is real and summons a cavodemon that rips the cable drum to peices and the kite falls on his daughters teachers house? What if the kite gains sentience and decides to fly to Venus?
You fucking moron!
Where is the prototype? (Score:4, Insightful)
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they say turin.
it's different company.
27 is peak, so, it might not mean anything significant or it might. if it meant anything significant then that 'research' should already be self financing.. I would think.
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In fact, the prototype they have actually built is "5kW average and 40kW peak": http://www.kitegen.com/en/prod... [kitegen.com]
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27Mw is no small prototype, but there seems to be nothing about it anywhere.
That's how it is with prototypes.
This is why the word begins with the Latin root protos, meaning first or primitive.
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Ergh. Darn it! Yes, you're right. You win. :-P
This has been around a while (Score:5, Interesting)
This has been around a while; kites, windbelts, and laddermills were my area to cover for presentations when taking classes on sustainable energy in 2010, and they were a lot of fun. Anything that gives you an excuse to play footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing and demonstrating the awesome power of wind is pretty cool.
Kites hold a lot of promise; they're far safer for wildlife than any turbine, even the large slow ones that don't deserve their bad rap, and they produce up to a third of a turbine's power given similar operating area, for a tiny sliver of the material cost. Solar's cool and all, but wind power has become surprisingly diverse in its options tailored for different environments, and is becoming more so.
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Solar's cool and all, ...
Speaking of which - it would potentially be worth putting solar panels on the sunny side of a kite.
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> demonstrating the awesome stupidity of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge designers.
FTFY
(Actually that may be a bit harsh, ignorance may be a better word)
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Yeah, the bad rap that big wind turbines get is undeserved.
Skyscrapers and power lines kill far more birds than wind turbines.
And, y'know, I never heard anyone sling that mud at the idea of a Space Elevator. . . I wonder why.
3 eurocents per kWh (Score:2)
is dirt-cheap. Here in Austria, I pay around 18 cents per kWh for power that comes for 80% from wind and water plants. I guess this part of the country would have a potential comparable to that of Switzerland, due to comparable geography: a rather flat basin (of the Danube) with the Alps close.
Makani leading the field (Score:2)
Aeronautical Hazards (Score:3)
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Flight restrictions, both permanent and temporary, are already quite common, there are a few websites that show maps of them (one relatively user friendly is http://tfrvisualizer.com/ [tfrvisualizer.com] ), checking where they are and avoiding them is part of the normal flight routine.
Ok, but how often are they accidentally entered into anyway and how many consist of 10,000' high series of barrage balloons equivalents probably capable to bringing a plane down?
the kites look really cool (Score:1)
Yes, sure, for us it does. I am pretty convinced though that the folks living in the neighborhood of such a power plant will have a different opinion on that.
The 27MW takes 9 kites flying at 10km altitude. That means a measly 100MW plant will consist of 33 kites. A 1GW plant requires ~330 kites.
Nobody wants this in their neighborhood, just as everybody likes wind-power but nobody wants the windmill in his backyard.
Also, the large scale introduction of kites, flying at 10km height, is going to be an issue fo
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Who wants any kind of 100MW plant in their backyard? 100MW is an awful lot of power. Doesn't matter how you generate it, it's going to have to involve some combination of extreme areas, extreme pressures, and extreme temperatures - otherwise the physics doesn't work. If you want it small, it's going to have to be high pressure and/or hot. If you want it low pressure and cool, it's got to be huge. This ignores all other potential issues with each given type of power plant...
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If I remember this company's tech correctly, the wind drags it out, turning a generator as it goes. They then switch it to a low-drag mode and reel it back in. So it cycles between high power generation and low power consumption. The concept being that you'd have many of them so that you'd get continuous net generation.
Re:How does the power conversion work? (Score:5, Interesting)
If I remember this company's tech correctly, the wind drags it out, turning a generator as it goes. They then switch it to a low-drag mode and reel it back in. So it cycles between high power generation and low power consumption. The concept being that you'd have many of them so that you'd get continuous net generation.
Slow and powerful drag out is going to have a massive, complicated, and hard to maintain gear box to run a generator. Generators run at hundreds of RPM. This is the same problem with big wind turbines, making power into RPM in a gear box is hard. If you have a wind farm around, look at the ones that are stopped they'll have black stains on them where the gear box failed.
On a tower, they are difficult to service.
On a floating, bobbing, need to use a boat to get to, they are probably going to have to un-hook them and bring them to shore to fix.
Those kite things are overly optimistic given the state of the gearbox technology used today.
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Sounds a lot easier than for a large scale wind turbine, the RPM is surely much higher - even if you need to gear it up somewhat.
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Designed by Italians, not Germans my friend. Inefficiency is a bonus.
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"If you want to be smart figure out how to improve the steam cycle or cumbustion cycle most LARGE power plants operate off of."
Spoken as someone who really and truly has no idea what has happened to date in the power industry, and who has no clue about the laws of thermodynamics.
These processes have been optimized for decades. Thermodynamics defines the maximum efficiency of all cycles used in combustion and heat transfer. The cycles used to generate power are already operating very close, or at the very le
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Well... to some extent. You can always run hotter to be able to get more efficiency - for example, that's why coal gassification is more efficient than burning solid coal, you can run it very hot through a gas turbine. Also, recovery of heat once it gets to lower temperature differentials is often not done, so some new work is in making that more affordable, which is a big boon to resources that are fundamentally lower temperature (like geothermal). And of course pairing the two, high temperature cycles
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So unless someone presents credible evidence the fossil fuel power industry has been intentionally wasting billions of their own dollars, we have to assume modern energy plant efficiency is pretty close to optimal
A stupid comment from a stupid person (Score:1)
Linear motion, like the expansion of a gas, into rotational motion, like the spinning of a turbine?
Remaining Skeptical (Score:3)
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So to pick a nuclear power plant at relatively random, the Braidwood nuclear plant in Illinois generates about 20 million MWh per year at a construction cost of $5.2 billion. To generate the
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Cool looking? (Score:2)
why not run it on gravity? (Score:2)
So use that as a starting point and then look at the diagram of the ridiculously over-complicated kite sys
Re:Another case of un-intended consequences (Score:5, Informative)
The global wind resource is 72TW. You're going to have a hard time denting that. You might alter things locally - might - but not globally.
And besides that... if any evil greedy megacorp wants to move into my valley and setup something that will rob the wind of its energy... Please Do! Seriously, someone should really work on wind turbines specifically designed to act as windbreaks, in a manner that can be affordably mass produced and deployed in lieu of traditional manufactured windbreak systems.
(Before anyone says "just plant some trees..." I do, every year. They usually get killed by the weather, sometimes outright uprooted. I may have to start spending more time on each tree individually, encasing each one in its own individual PVC windbreak in addition to the broad rows of pallet windbreaks)
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We increased forcing from CO2 50%. The power didn't come from our putting energy into the system, it came from stopping the sunlight leaving so quick. Hence your comparison is ridiculous and moronic.
But it was the "best" you had, so you went with it.
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Thank you for repeating my point.