Sustainable Futures

"Flying Electric Generators and Other Tethered Methods"

Flying Electric Generators and Other Tethered Methods"

1% of the jetstream's wind power could supply all US electrical demand. Also, one of the main complaints about wind power is its intermittency--the wind doesn't blow all the time, and so (according to Sky Windpower), most wind farms are only operating at their peak capacity 19-35% of the time. The wind is much steadier at altitude, so you get even more advantage over ground-based wind power. A final advantage is ad-hoc generation: devices with a reasonably simple tether-system do not have to be permanently installed in one place, they could be trucked out to any location that needed them.

biggest lightning rod you've ever seen.

The obvious question is safety. What happens if one of these things falls out of the sky? The proposed design has quadruple-redundancy in the propellers used to hold it up and generate power, and the units could be located away from population centers, so that seems reasonable. What about planes running into them, or more likely, their tethers? They would fly in restricted airspace. Sky Windpower points out that there are already many high-altitude tethered balloons in the US that have not had problems, and that enough installations to generate 100% of the US's power needs could fit in 1/400th of the nation's airspace. What about birds getting killed? They say that the flying windmills could make noise that would keep birds away; this would be prohibitive for ground-based turbines, but at high altitude no people will be around to be annoyed by it.

Combined with a growing number of states that have adopted renewable electricity standards, the PTC has been a major driver of wind power development over the past six years. Unfortunately, the "on-again/off-again" status that has historically been associated with the PTC contributes to a boom-bust cycle of development that plagues the wind industry (see Figure below).