Flying Energy Generators: maybe the next big thing. More than pie in the sky
There is a nascent industry that may be on the verge of generating inexpensive, and most importantly reliable, electricity from renewable sources - requiring comparatively small amounts of public funding to push through to success.
An untapped wind resource
Wind power on commercially developable sites could supply 72 Terawatts, many times the power the world consumes today[2]. U.S wind resources are among the world's richest.[3]. But much of this potential is far from where electricity is consumed, requiring expensive new transmission to become usable. Further, because wind power at an individual site is variable, to ensure availability of wind power when wanted requires even more transmission, so that wind from one site can be used when no power is available from another. Even more expensive are requirements for storage and backup, to provide power when no wind site happens to be generating. None of these requirements are impossible to meet. The additional expense of a system including such stabilizers could be more than paid for if the slightly more expensive electricity generated was used more efficiently than we use power at present.
But if wind power could be generated less expensively, and generated in a way that required less transmission, less storage and less backup that would be extremely useful. It happens that there is a source of stronger more reliable wind.
The wind resources mentioned are at 100 meters of height or under. The higher the altitude, the faster the wind blows. Other factors being equal, the power available from wind is the cube of its speed. Wind at 1 kilometer can generate a bit less than twice the energy of a turbine at 100 meters. A turbine at ten kilometers can generate eight or more times the energy of a turbine at 100 meters.. Estimated high altitude energy potential is about 100 times all energy human civilization currently consumes.
At first glance, the potential of high altitude wind power appears tantalizingly out of reach. While we could probably build one kilometer wind towers, the cost of towers that size are unlikely to ever be low enough that doubling generation will come close to paying for them. And if a one kilometer tower is impractical, a ten kilometer tower seems even less plausible.
Fortunately, giant towers are not the only means we have to reach high altitudes. Kites have been used for millennia, balloons for centuries, motorized planes and helicopters for more than 100 years. Put turbines on an automated kite, plane, balloon or helicopter with no human pilot. Run a tether to transmit the electricity to the ground, and in (in many cases) to provide power for the initial launch. The result is a flying energy generator, a wind turbine or turbines on a flying platform that can provide higher energy density and higher energy reliability and capacity factor than ground based wind turbines at a lower cost. Many developers claim that such flying energy generators (FEGs) could produce electricity with a life cycle cost of less than 2 cents per kWh with a capacity factor of 70% and above (comparable to the capacity factor of coal plants.) This is not merely an idea. A number of companies have working prototypes. It has been proven possible, though not yet practical. The only way to determine practicality will be for someone (either the government or venture capitalists) to fund the transition from proof of concept prototypes to quarter scale commercial prototypes and finally to full scale commercial prototypes. Any one of the companies working on this could probably be fully funded for the cost of the stationary budget of the Department of Energy.
Read the whole thing at: http://www.grist.org/article/flying-energy-generators-a-breakthrough-ready-to-happen http://tinyurl.com/flyingwnd
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