Caption: A Sky WindPower kite of turbines might capture wind energy with spinning rotors and send electricity to the ground through the wire that tethers it. [Credit Ben Shepard].
Dr. Ken Caldeira was kind enough to offer corrections to an earlier post on high wind power opportunities. Which motivated me to investigate the high wind option just a bit. While not a baseload option, the intermittent power density of high wind over land is superior to good windy offshore locations (these offshore sites are subject to high capital cost, high maintenance and high transmission cost).
(…) Overall, 95% of the time the optimal wind power density (Figure 4e) is >0.2 kW/m2 over most of the populated land and the optimal height is <6,000 m. This means that, at an average inland location, 95% of the time the high- altitude wind power density available is greater than the median wind power density at windy offshore locations near ground (Figure S1.1).
Here is the abstract from the quoted paper by Archer & Caldeira, 2009 “Global Assessment of High-Altitude Wind Power”:
The available wind power resource worldwide at altitudes between 500 and 12,000 m above ground is assessed for the first time. Twenty-eight years of wind data from the reanalyses by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction and the Department of Energy are analyzed and interpolated to study geographical distributions and persistency of winds at all altitudes. Furthermore, intermittency issues and global climate effects of large scale extraction of energy from high-altitude winds are investigated.
I recommend the full text of the paper, available here [PDF, 1MB], which is part of a special Energies report on Wind Energy. I don’t think it is possible to dismiss some contribution from high wind simply by study. Like CCS it requires building and operating from pilot projects to a utility scale installation to discover what the real-world life cycle costs are likely to be.
Venture money has been pouring into “cleantech”. Are there signs of any serious private capital going into high wind startups? I’ve not had great success finding funding examples. But there are definitely seekers out there. There are patent filings. And this is an arena which seems seductive – i.e., likely to attract an ongoing stream of engineers thinking up new, innovative approaches. There is a fun survey article at Clean Tech Reading, including lots of illustrations of concepts.
Sky Windpower Corporation hopes to commercialize a design something like the artist illustration above.
Google seems to have invested $15 million or more in Alameda-based Makani Power, whose kite-power team looks to be enjoying a lot of kite surfing.
Milan, Italy-based Kite Gen is also in the high wind space. NextBigFuture hints of 15 million euro funding, but I can’t find anything solid on it.
Kanata, Ontario startup Magenn seems to be receiving the most press attention, and gets my vote for best illustrations of their concepts. And you can apply to invest here. More illustrations at Trendir. Two years ago Fortune said “Stage of development: A ten- or 25-kilowatt version will be tested with Magenn’s first customer in 2009. “
My puzzlement continues: is it appropriate for taxpayers to invest in speculative development like high wind? If so, would leveraging off of matching private investment improve the odds of selecting viable projects? Will the possibility of taxpayer-matching-funds pry loose any venture money besides Google?
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