Flying a kite (again)

[DamonHD]

Hi,

This comes up at FL from time to time: kites for wind generation, eg:

https://www.teslarati.com/google-x-clean-energy-kite-wind-power-generation-anywhere/

This chap showed up on the BBC a couple of months ago and just popped back into my head:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-scotland-59190335
https://windswept-and-interesting.co.uk/

Not even 100 miles from Scoraig!  B^>

Views on the chances of this working at scale like boring old HAWT to make wind farms?

Rgds

Damon

[SparWeb]

Wow.  Kinda frightening to have that machine over my house - I'd rather see it out in the desert.

The platform it lands on requires about as much invested energy as it will produce in a year, and is roughly equivalent to a tower.  So what's the point?  Just to get 1000 feet up?  That gains some on wind speed but the machine is so vulnerable on that cable.

[MattM]

Noise generator.  Fun to watch.  Horrible in practice.

[kitestrings]

Again, yes.  Kinetic wind sculpture.

[SparWeb]

The Magenn:

[MattM]

The blimp looks like a UFO turned a quarter rotation.  It's probably not very efficient since its rotating on an axis perpindicular with the wind.  Even worse than the barnstormer sound of the first example because it is ugly.

Windmills were meant to be pretty.

[richhagen]

I do not see such a scheme actually being reliable and durable enough for long term profitability.  Rich