From the Carnegie Institution , some lofty ideas. Would you imagine a steady energy supply coming from high altitude kites?
Enough wind to power global energy demand
Washington, D.C.— There is enough energy available in winds to meet all of the world’s demand. Atmospheric turbines that convert steadier and faster high-altitude winds into energy could generate even more power than ground- and ocean-based units. New research from Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira examines the limits of the amount of power that could be harvested from winds, as well as the effects high-altitude wind power could have on the climate as a whole. Their work is published September 9 by Nature Climate Change.
Led by Kate Marvel of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who began this research at Carnegie, the team used models to quantify the amount of power that could be generated from both surface and atmospheric winds. Surface winds were defined as those that can be accessed by turbines supported by towers on land or rising out of the sea. High-altitude winds were defined as those that can be accessed by technology merging turbines and kites. The study looked only at the geophysical limitations of these techniques, not technical or economic factors.
Turbines create drag, or resistance, which removes momentum from the winds and tends to slow them. As the number of wind turbines increase, the amount of energy that is extracted increases. But at some point, the winds would be slowed so much that adding more turbines will not generate more electricity. This study focused on finding the point at which energy extraction is highest.
Using models, the team was able to determine that more than 400 terrawatts of power could be extracted from surface winds and more than 1,800 terrawatts could be generated by winds extracted throughout the atmosphere.
Today, civilization uses about 18 TW of power. Near-surface winds could provide more than 20 times today’s global power demand and wind turbines on kites could potentially capture 100 times the current global power demand.
At maximum levels of power extraction, there would be substantial climate effects to wind harvesting. But the study found that the climate effects of extracting wind energy at the level of current global demand would be small, as long as the turbines were spread out and not clustered in just a few regions. At the level of global energy demand, wind turbines might affect surface temperatures by about 0.1 degree Celsius and affect precipitation by about 1%. Overall, the environmental impacts would not be substantial.
“Looking at the big picture, it is more likely that economic, technological or political factors will determine the growth of wind power around the world, rather than geophysical limitations,” Caldeira said.
It sounds like just more pie-in-the-sky to me They’ll never get these airy-fairy schemes off the ground.
Then there’s the problem of UV degradation of the synthetics used to make the sails and lanyards, and what happens when one finally lets go and gets tangled up in surface infrastructure or sucked into a jet engine.
Let alone pointing out that if you stopped the wind, then global warming would be horrendous, because you’ve stopped the convection engine.
Sounds like a lot of hot air to me! Leave out little things like “technology” & “economics” & you can do anything. I recall the anniversary BBC programme they did some years back now on star Trek, & they had a guy going over the physics of Warp engines & power generation, & the only fly in the ointment he could find was the little one of a world shortage of dilythium crystals!!! Anyway, a weekend of Red Dwarf was more than enough for me with Ace Rimmer accused of being as “about as butch as an ice-skaters friend”!
I thought that idiocy is the privilege of poor, corrupt and uneducated countries. The Carnegie Institution might consider strapping a belt around the equator, hooking it up to a generator, and presto! Free energy form the earth’s rotation (until it slows down and stops). Or install a big funnel and collect backround radiation from the Big Bang (that should last awhile).
@Martin Audley says:
September 10, 2012 at 12:53 am
“Jeesh – They really don’t know when to give up do they?
It’s not as if this cockeyed idea hasn’t been torn to pieces so many many times before.
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/2007%20September.htm
Why won’t these academics in their mathematical towers ju st tell us ONE thing:
“How much does the tether weigh?”
Do the maths. Then go back to sleep.”
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According to my post-normal mathematical calculations, IF we use superconductive unobtainium, the tether could possibly only be as big around as my little finger and could weigh as little as 0.027 grams per kilometer… maybe… if I remembered to carry the 2 and divide by the number of cats in Belgium.
If this imaginary world were to come to fruition then the requirement of near even distribution of wind turbines will cause greenie activists whine about wind turbine justice.
What’s a terrawatt? The SI system has a unit of measurement called the terawatt, I can only assume they are related. Whoever wrote the press release wasn’t too fussy about spell checking.
Very practical, first take 18 miles of high quality conductive cable, cut into 3 six mile lengths, and inset the triangular dividers at 2 yard intervals. Connect these wires to the turbine and the ground receiving station. Next attach the tether cable to the turbine ensuring that it is the specified one thousand ton breaking strain. Attach the kite in it’s self deploying module with the main switch in the safe position.
Next using appropriate lifting gear, place the turbine on the launch rocket, being careful to latch it correctly for self deployment. Double check that all cabling is laid out as per instructions to prevent tangling. You are now ready to deploy your life time guarantee 500MW wind turbine into the jet stream. What could possibly go wrong.
What about safety? I never read anything about that in this context.
The obvious technical solution is to build windfarms which have wind tubes which channel things like the jet streams to where their needed. To not upset the skeptics, they’ll be called wind canals and wind irrigation pipelines and high wind transmission lines so they’ll think it’s just a continuation of what we’ve already built for things like water, electricity, etc. After all, the skeptics still believe NASA still has that Moon landing warehouse tucked away in Area 51. They won’t even notice until we cover the planet. We’ll eventually enclose them into true tubes (which the Brit skeptics will think are subways) and put in a massive switching system. That way, folks that live in “skeptic land”, like the southern USA can just be blown off the face of the Earth. Then we can rename the Earth to what it should rightly be — “Terminus” — just like Isaac Asmov described in The Foundation series. Oh, and their names shouild be “Dylan Diverters” after this:
Now all we need to discover is where the food will come from but the Google chaps seems to have a handle on that one with their space initiative.
Don’t worry about the air traffic- there won’t be any when these clowns take over. It’s back to horse and buggy days. Backwards ho!
Ernest Lawrence is looking down on this in disgust. He was one of the few atomic founders who were NOT Soviet spies, and he worked hard to kick the Soviets out of the labs. Now it’s clear that our major labs have been fully occupied by saboteurs. They’re no longer working for Russia, but they’re still Soviets.
(However, the current generation of saboteurs are transparently ignorant and stupid, so maybe this is actually Lawrence’s revenge! Comrade Oppenheimer would never have wasted time on something as absurd as kite power.)
Bill Cody flew (?) on a kite, sitting in a basket. He did it by using a sequence of small to big kites to overcome the weight of the lines etc…but try to factor up to even a small turbine ?
And at what is the minimum turbine capacity needed to make it economically worthwhile…..you could end up with millions of these things…….blotting out sunlight…work out the shadow one of these would generate…..I could go on, but.
Consign it to the bin – if you can’t make a technical case then it’s not kites, it’s pie in the sky.
Niek Rodenburg says:
September 10, 2012 at 12:11 am
Dutch astronaut and professor at the Delft University of Tenhnology Dr. Wubbo Ockels designed the Kite Power and did some encouraging experiments recently.
See his website for more details: http://www.kitepower.eu/home.html
I thinks that’s impressive. Of course, if enough of these things were airborne to make really useful amounts of power for a town, the tether lines would tangle unless they were spaced so far apart that you’d soon encroach on the neighbouring towns ‘airspace’, but still, it might work for a remote farm with no power grid near to it.
Can’t see them being popular with aircraft pilots though.
Disentangling the tether from the countryside/cars/power lines when the thing comes down might be a challenge…
Still, some clever automation and development of in flight reliability might minimise that.
A much safer and technically feasible alternative is powering civilistion with hamster wheels.
My model shows that you can generate all of the 18 TW of power with 14 hamsters and a sufficient number of wheels per square meter.
Assumptions:
1 Hamster averages 0.009 W (source: instructables)
Earth has 148,940,000 km^2 of available land mass.
No high strength cabels, stacking of hamster cages or other unproven technology involved. There is a problem of intermittancy, but that can be solved by averaging the output of large numbers of hamster wheels with a transcontinental grid as envisioned by Buckminster Fuller or Technocracy Inc.
I think they mean 100 metres off the ground as “high altitude”. Slightly higher winds- no more reliable.
“The point about high-altitude winds is that they always blow.”
Not always. Check the plots every day for the next few weeks: http://weather.unisys.com/upper_air/ua_const.php?plot=30k&inv=0&t=cur&expanddiv=hide_bar You will see that where there is an upper ridge (or sometimes an upper low), the wind stops. Then it may reverse direction. This idea is about as lame as offshore wind, very expensive and unreliable.
Lot of mention of circulation patterns etc. I would think the “Butterfly effect” to be much more powerful. Tap into the jetstream with kites and who knows what will come of it. A small nudge here, another there and soon enough it will be sunshine in Seattle, and snow in Miami.
Think of the lawsuits! Think of the potential of weather control…
The Chu DOE is already funding this lunacy…..Makani Power of Almeda is one of the kite money pits….ironic that the promoter of this kite marvel is “Kate Marvel” ! ! !
Elitist owned Pop Sci [Bonnier] and Pop Mechs [Hearst] are all over this ‘technology’. More at
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Inventors-high-flying-kites-harness-wind-power-3211762.php
There’s lots of wacky ideas about using wind or solar or tidal power to fix the woes of the world, but I thought it had been pretty well demonstrated that you could offset more emissions and generate reliable power from installing Combined Cycle Gas Turbine power stations. Wind will always require baseload power in the event that the wind stops blowing.
Here’s a thought – what happens when one of these things gets struck by lightning?
Eric (skeptic) says at September 10, 2012 at 3:42 am that the winds are not always blowing at high altitude. Good point. But they are a lot more reliable than downlow.
The Dutch guy whoi has bee linked to claims his kites already double operating time and as the materials are a lot cheaper than turbines it is not acceptable to just ignore the possibility.
Technology is good.
http://www.kitepower.eu/technology.html
Aslo, not that the generator is on the surface. There is no copper cable in the sky. The rope sails up and then glides back again with the motion converted ot electricty on the surface. is website says it can be used at sea so that may mitigate the justiifable aviation fears.
I’m just suggesting that new technology shouldn’t be rejected before you’ve done the sums and the experiments.
I think there must be some kind of wacknoodle underground contest going on to see who can come up with the most insane and unworkable concept/study. It’s difficult to see how proposals like this one can do anything but elicit gales of laughter from the authors and their associates.
Wouldn’t it make much more sense to try to capture the electricity from lightning?
There is a plethora of it world wide.
http://geology.com/articles/lightning-map.shtml
It would be as likely to be successful as the wind/kite silliness.
/sarc/sarc/sarc/sarc
Sillier than windmills.
Starts at about 2:50