Energy from kites!

A popular childrens toy could well could provide the next breakthrough in renewable energy! After successful testing in one of Europe’s top research centres with scientists from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, 10 kilowatts of power was produced by flying a giant kite tethered to a generator. 10 kilowatts of power is enough electricity to run 10 family homes, and all from a 10-sq metre kite. The researchers are planning to test a 50kW version in the near future, called Laddermill, eventually they hope to produce a version with multiple kites that could generate as much as 100 megawatts (this could power 100,000 homes!)

The scientists from Delft University are not alone. Google.org (a philanthropic arm of the Google web-search company) invested 10 million dollars last year in another kite company based in the US called Makani. There is also an Italian company called Kitegen which has proposed a theoretical design for a kite system generating a gigawatt of electricity using 12 sets of four 500 sq metre kites.

The aim of all these teams is to tap into the vast energy resources of high-altitude wind (a kilometre or more above the ground), where winds carry hundreds of times more energy than at ground level and are also more consistent. According to Ken Caldeira (a senior climate scientist at Stanford University), the total energy contained in high altitude wind is 100 times greater than the amount of energy currently required by the whole planet.

Commercial wind turbines simply cannot be built high enough to take advantage of these winds at high altitudes but kites can easily reach a kilometre or more of altitude. In Europe there are many sites suitable, thanks to the high-speed jet stream, for large scale power generation using kites.

The kites generate power by pulling on a wire attached to a generator on the ground, the rapid speed of the rising kite generates copious amounts of power then once the kite has reached maximum altitude it is simply reeled in to repeat the process.

Unlike many other proposed alternative technologies, high altitude wind power is available right now, it is estimated that with sufficient capital investment, commercially viable systems producing electricity at around 10c per kilowatt hour could be established in less than 5 years.

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