WindLift Power

In an earlier post I mentioned that everyone involved in kite power should put their heads together and try to solve some of the vexing problems we all face. It looks like the European teams had the same idea. Gaylord Olsen recently made me aware of a workshop in Belgium on January 30, 20007. The website for the event has links to download movies and presentations.

It is great to see the amazing progress being made on kite power. All the talks were excellent, covering topics as diverse as automated control, system design, economic rationale, and power output models. Hopefully, we can find a way to share innovations to keep kite power moving into the mainstream. I plan to contact them after I have some data to share from our next prototype.

Moritz Diehl made five interesting and provocative claims that really got me thinking, and reflected a major debate within the WindLift design effort. Those claims were:

-Kite lines will be far from vertical, kites fly at low angles
-Lift control will play crucial role
-Kites will be “pumping” rather than turning a carousel
-Plants will be built rather on sea than on land
-Connection to ground by only one line, not two or more

Our current design effort has moved in exactly that direction, the only difference being the final point. Due to cost and technology considerations we chose to connect our kites to the pumping engine with 4-lines. A single line connection requires a steering system suspended from the kite, including motors, sensory apparatus, and power source. In our attempt to make this initial model a cheap, simple, manually operated, mechanically controlled system this was not feasible. For larger scale installations that include some kind of lighter-than-air foil (hydrogen or helium filled) this could be a possibility, but for the small distributed applications WindLift is targetting we need to keep it cheap and simple.