WindLift Power

I just got an interesting email last night from Dave Culp, CEO of KiteShip. Check out www.kiteship.com. Dave has some ideas on how to reduce the cost of WindLift by an order of magnitude. Sounds good to me! Who wouldn’t want a 5 hp system for under $100.

I haven’t had any time to really poke around the KiteShip website, but first I want to congratulate them on winning the 2006 California Clean Tech award in the Transportation category. Check out their video.

The model they use is very similar to a design I was messing around with last year, with an aerostat at the core of the airfoil. Lately I have been making my lighter-than-air (LTA) designs as leading-edge-inflatable (LEI) bow kites because I want WindLift to be able to incorporate donated older-model kite boarding kites.

Dave is on vacation in Maui, and he spent some time with my friend Dan Tracy at KiteforSail. Dan is taking the same bootstrapping approach as me, trying to extract all the power we can out of smaller, commercially available kite boarding kites.  At this stage in the kite power industry I think it is important for all the pioneers to get together and share solutions.

Kite Power will be over a $100 billion dollar industry in 20 years, and until competition heats up there really isn’t much to gain from secrecy and aggressive intellectual property strategies (If there ever is).

It would be pretty cools to get Wubbo Ockels, John Mizzi, Fred Ferguson, Dan Tracy, Massimo Ippolito, Stephan Wrage, Dominique and Bruno Legaignoux, Dave Culp, Dave Lang, Peter Lynn, Gaylord Olson, all the folks at the Drachen Foundation and any of the other kite power pioneers in the same room to share knowledge. We might end up ripping a hole in the space-time continuum, but I’m willing to take my chances.