High altitude winds has enough energy to power the world many times over. In this blog in the past I have mentioned about Alteros BAT and Kite Powered Electricity. Two years ago Google acquired a company called Makani Power .
The company is a green energy company that has built high altitude energy kites that can tap into the energy provided by high altitude winds to generate electricity. The advantage of using a kite to generate electricity is that one saves on cost of transportation of equipments required for setting up a wind energy tower and also the cost of setting up a wind tower with wind turbine is very high.
While a wind tower can go up to the the height of 120 metres. The Makani wind energy kites with a strong flexible teether can achieve a height of 80 to 350 meters. It is way cheaper than a wind turbine as no tower has to be built. Since these kites are aerodynamic they can access stronger winds and that is why every individual kite can generate 50% more energy.
A single kite can produce upto 600 kW of energy at a wind speed of 11.5 m/sec. The system begins to generate power at a wind speed 4 m/s. At a height of 250 meteres such wind speeds are achieved very easily.
More information about the revolutionary technology can be obtained from this site http://www.google.com/makani .
The following video shows how the system works
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