Wind Energy

Recently, I wrote an article about wind turbines. I explained how they worked and some of their uses. This article is an extension on that article, except I will not be explaining how to capture the wind using windmill fastened to the ground, instead how to collect the winds power using kites. But first, let me break down how wind power works. Wind has the second highest potential to generate power, second only to the solar power. Essentially, wind is created when the sun heats the air causing it to rise, and when the cooler air from the surrounding areas quickly fill in the empty space under the rising heated air, wind happens. This can be seen daily on large lake fronts and on the ocean, and happens often everywhere else, but not as consistently.

It has been discovered that as you get closer to the ground, wind speeds tend to die down, and the fastest moving wind is typically over 300 feet off the ground. In an attempt to gather more and more of the energy from the faster moving winds, wind mills have been built higher. Originally wind mills were from 50-100 feet tall with blades between 25-50 feet long. Today these numbers has more than tripled! Land based wind mills are over 300 feet tall with blades over 100 feet long. They are even planning on building ocean based windmills even larger to gather even more energy from the wind. And this is an excellent plan to help humanity reduce its need for crude oil and coal to produce electricity. But we can go even further than this.

When you think of a kite, you probably imagine an 8 year old in a field with a striped kite on a long string, or  a water skier surfing the waves. But these are just a couple uses for kites. They can also be used generate large amounts of power by gathering the power from wind upwards of 2000 feet above the ground. The wind speeds at these altitudes are nearly twice as high as they are 300 feet above the ground which means a much higher potential to generating power.

You might be wondering how a kite can generate power. Well it is really quite simple. If you can picture a  propeller plane with six or more propellers on a hang glider, that is what a wind power kite generator looks like. And the larger the kite, the more propellers it can fit, and the more propellers or larger propellers the kite can fit, the higher the potential to generate more energy. Each one the propellers works just like a wind mill where every time the blade spins around, the turbine it is connected to spins generating electricity which is sent down the kite string to a power grid or battery. This is the simple part of how high altitude wind powered kite generators work. The complex part is getting the extremely large kite up high enough to catch the wind needed to spin the turbines and keep it flying.

This can be done any number of ways, if it is fairly small, on a windy day several people can get it in the air and direct it to the high speed winds. If the kite is fairly large, other means such as helicopters or planes will me needed to get the kite generator in the air. Once the kite is in the air, it is unlikely that someone would want to track its movements 24/7 and make corrections to its course to keep the kite at the correct altitude and going in the right direction. Currently, several groups are working a drone like technology to track the kite at all times and make small corrections where needed to keep the kite at the correct altitude and going in the right direction to keep the kite in the air and to make sure it is generating as much power as possible. This is very difficult to do because with so many variables at any given moment, even a highly sophisticated piloting system can have trouble keeping the kite in the air and going the right direction to make the turbines spin.

With current high altitude kite generator technology, a single kite can power up to 5 homes, which is not much, but it can be run 24/7. But they are working on kites that can generate 15 kilowatts an hour. This would be equivalent to powering 150 homes. The kite generators are much cheaper to produce than a windmill because there isn't a 300 foot base on it as well. High altitude wind powered generator kites have a lot of potential, but need to me used in combination with land based windmills. If you have any questions or comments, please post below or send me an email. The contact information is under the contact page. Thanks for reading!

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