permaculture

[dwoodard@becon.org]

The jetstream wiggles around a lot, by many hundreds of miles. I don't
see a tethered turbine in one location being in it more than a small
fraction of the time.

Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada


On Wed, 1 Feb 2006, Keith Johnson wrote:

>
>       Flying windmills -- power from the sky
>
> A Worldchanging post rounds up three different airborne power-generation
> systems -- a flying windmill, a windmill-equipped zeppelin, and a
> kite-based windmill.
>
>       According to their figures, one flying windmill rated at 240kW
>     with rotor diameters of 35 feet could generate power for less than
>     two cents per kilowatt hour--that would make them the cheapest power
>     source in the world. For greater power needs, several units would be
>     operated in the same location--Sky Windpower says that an
>     installation "rated at 2.81 megawatts flying at a typical U.S. site
>     with an eighty percent capacity factor projects a life cycle cost
>     per kilowatt hour at 1.4 cents." And they would have far better
>     uptime than most windmills--since the jetstream never quits, they
>     should operate at peak capacity 70-90% of the time. Output would
>     also be less dependent on location than it is on the ground, simply
>     because terrain doesn't matter much when you're at 35,000ft;
>     however, since the jetstream and other "geostrophic" winds don't
>     blow much at latitudes near the equator, it would be useful
>     primarily for middle- and higher-latitudes.
>
> Link <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004052.html>
>