Jet Stream Kites Could Power New York City 263
Damien1972 writes to tell us that researchers from the Carnegie Institution and California State University claim that a fleet of kites could harvest enough energy to run New York and other major cities, especially if they are affected by polar jet streams. "Using 28 years of data from the National Center for Environmental Prediction and the Department of Energy, Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology and Cristina Archer of California State University, Chico compiled the first global survey of wind energy available at high altitudes in the atmosphere. They found that the regions best suited for harvesting this energy align with population centers in the eastern U.S. and East Asia, although they note that 'fluctuating wind strength still presents a challenge for exploiting this energy source on a large scale.'"
How is this going to impact the aircraft? (Score:2, Insightful)
New York already has the most congested airways in the country, and possibly in the world. If these kites are at 30,000 feet, and most commercial airplanes fly around 35,000 feet, how are we not going to have a bunch of severed kites everywhere?
Or is this just "Let's Dream [slashdot.org] a Dream" Day [slashdot.org] on Slashdot?
Re:Cool... (Score:2, Insightful)
Call Charlie Brown - we've got a kite-eating tree! (Score:4, Insightful)
The heck with backup power sources -- who covers the liability when 6 miles of power-transmitting cable come crashing to the ground? And how much wind does it take to support the weight of 6 mile long high voltage wire?
Power line (Score:5, Insightful)
A kite which can support a 30,000 foot electric line? I'm thinking there are some serious engineering challenges there. Probably involving unobtanium and other exotic materials.
Re:How is this going to impact the aircraft? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Major side benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
Great defense against incoming jetliners as the kites get sucked into engines, either from terrorists or major campaign donors out for a spin in Air Force One.
America circa 1960: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
America circa 2009: "OMG terrorists!"
Honestly, will we ever get our national cojones back?
(not that I think kite-power is necessarily a realistic idea, I'm just tired of the knee-jerk genuflection towards our new Al Quaeda overlords)
Re:Cool... (Score:5, Insightful)
No doubt a fleet of electricity generating kites are going to cost a pretty penny.
Why is there "no doubt" about this? Is there some reason why kites have to be very expensive?
Second, why would you invest in a new technology when there are other (probably more-efficient) green technologies.
For the same reason you invested in the other green technologies even when there were older technologies already available then -- because it was a promising idea.
Now isn't the time to start innovating from scratch with the global recession.
Now is exactly the time. A few technological "game changers" could be just what it takes to boost us out of recession.
Lastly, where are going to put them, in the plains of the Midwest?
Sure, why not? Or any other place that has wind at 30,000 feet and isn't in anybody's flight path.
What happens when the kites start interfering with birds and such?
Not many birds fly at 30,000 feet, Einstein.
Pipe dreams (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cool... (Score:3, Insightful)
But first off, where are we going to get the money to start buying kites? No doubt a fleet of electricity generating kites are going to cost a pretty penny. Second, why would you invest in a new technology when there are other (probably more-efficient) green technologies.
Ok, what - exactly what - is greener than a kite? Or a longer established technology? (cries, weeps bitter tears.)
On the gripping hand, you could have miniature wind turbines attached to the kite, perhaps tap the electrostatic potential between kite and ground (lots of moving air to add or remove charge) and you wouldn't really need to worry about lightning if you designed the thing to vapourise on a strike.
And they'd be pretty too. I'd vote for the Man in the Moon pattern myself.
Re:How many (Score:3, Insightful)
Only the ones that fly into it.
Next question...
Re:Hrmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Major side benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
> America circa 2009: "OMG terrorists!"
Eh? Dunno about you but the Air Force One gag included made it pretty clear to me the original poster was making a joke out of it, which is the correct response.
> Honestly, will we ever get our national cojones back?
Forget the cojones, how about some sanity and common sense?
Now getting back to the topic......
Look folks, this isn't rocket science. Modern civilization isn't possible without large quantities of energy in some form. The current situation is clearly unsustainable, depending on oil from places that hate our guts and use our dollars to destroy our civilization is insane. Ok, if we can agree on that we can move to the question of what should replace foreign oil. And it is a pretty short list:
1. More domestic production. Nice short term solution, I support it even; but Drill, Baby Drill! ain't nothing but a stopgap measure at best.
2. Something Green. Ok, this kite thing is typical of the category. Pie in the sky, impractical, decades away and will cost multiples what we pay for energy now. Assuming it can even be made to work at all. Again, if one of these notions eventually pans out, great. For the record I'm all for Unicorns and kittens too. But do we really need to put all our hopes on one of these miracles arriving in time to save us?
Especially in light of the hate enviros start heaping on any alternative source that begins to become practical? Hydro? NO! Already got nutter enviros against geothermal. How in the wide wide world of sports can an enviro be against geothermal! There are other reasons it hasn't become commonplace, but environmental concerns? Got enviros lining up against large scale solar. Wind turbines, besides Sen. Kennedy not wanting to see em off HIS beachfront, are noisy, ugly and kill birds. Oh no, wind isn't green enough. And we are laughing now about kites but if actual production started lighting up the grid you can bet enviros would have objections and they wouldn't be joking. And laughing at THEM gets you branded a 'hater' who wants to destroy the precious earth.
I think we have enough evidence to draw a conclusion: By the time a green tech gets into actual production it isn't green anymore. The real world at work? Or perhaps we need to understand the underlying truth. Greens don't want us to find innovative new sources of energy to continue our lifestyle, they want to make energy scarce so as to reshape our society along lines THEY find more pleasing. We aren't to get a vote in this, we aren't even supposed to know we have other options because we can't be trusted to make the 'correct' choice.
And meanwhile, while we sit around and beat off over the latest green tech fresh from some research project we actually DO NOTHING other than continue to send cash to help destabilize the middle east a little more.
3. We build the crap out of modern safe designs for fission plants and let that hold us until fusion finally gets into production.
Re:Major side benefit (Score:4, Insightful)
Forget the cojones, how about some sanity and common sense?
Now getting back to the topic......
Look folks, this isn't rocket science...
Damn, where are my mod points when I need them? I'll have to settle for putting you on the friends list.
In the interests of brevity you probably omitted the possibility that the greenie-green haters you reference may actually prefer to keep themselves in the public eye as some form of environmental elite. This wouldn't last if green solutions become mainstream, they'd be just like anybody else.
It's extremely annoying to a revolutionary when the establishment gives into their demands without a fight.
Re:Major side benefit (Score:4, Insightful)
1920 OMG Commies
1930 OMG Fascists
1940 OMG Fascists
1950 OMG Commies
1960 OMG Commies
1970 OMG Commies
1980 OMG Japan
1990 OMG Iraq
2000 OMG Muslims
Basically, the US has always had a national fear to attack. Independent thought is rare and independent action even rarer in the US.
Now shut up and go watch the TV.
Re:Major side benefit (Score:3, Insightful)
> Really? Name one.
Didn't I name enough in the original post?
I remember when hydroelectric was still hailed as almost an ultimate green tech, "Free energy from water!" Before the whinging about fish, before the land use issues, etc. These days it is considered as anything but green.
I remember when ethanol was THE replacement for gas. Actually try to make a few million gallons of the stuff and the problems become apparent enough for even a green idiot to see. Although I saw the problem a decade ago. We don't have enough farmland to feed both the world and our cars.
Solar was THE bee's knees when it was Kalifornicators using government subsidies to put collectors on their roof to get bragging rights over their neighbors over how 'enviromentally aware' they were. Try to scale it up to industrial production and there isn't ANYWHERE you can put square miles of collectors where some insignificant critter doesn't live... and might not thrive anymore if you turn it's desert habitat into cool shade under the solar collectors.
Plug in electric cars are another great impractical luxury good to get plenty of egoboo out of owning.... and being seen to own; so long as too many people don't try and actually own one. Then the question of where the hell is all of that additional electrical generating capacity going to come from needs an answer and it probably won't be too green.
Re:Major side benefit (Score:4, Insightful)
I think we have enough evidence to draw a conclusion: By the time a green tech gets into actual production it isn't green anymore. The real world at work?
Yeah, to a large extent, I think it is the real world at work. Nothing is free, and I don't mean that in terms of money. I mean anything that we use to "create" energy isn't really creating energy. Energy doesn't get created, it just gets collected, harnessed, and transfered. So pretty much anything we do to "create" energy will actually mean taking energy out of the environment somehow. That means it's going to have some kind of environmental impact.
So part of the problem is that these "greens" that you talk about, the people who want zero environmental impact, are people who want a free lunch and have no idea how the world works. They're utopianists. They're the same people who have some imagined model of government/economics that they think will solve all the world's problems. Hint: it's basically a big commune where we all share and everyone is always nice to each other.
They're also the people who 20 years ago thought the most important think for school children was "self esteem". They're the same people who think that if you just "be yourself", then people will like you, and that being honest and saying what you feel will solve all of your personal problems. They're the same sort of people who 40 years ago thought that love and freedom for tradition and social norms would fix the world.
They're children who think that all of our problems have simple and perfect solutions, and given a strategy to address certain problem, once they've discovered a down-side, they decide that it's complete unacceptable.
Re:Environmental issues? (Score:4, Insightful)
What happens when you pull that much energy out of the jetstream?
"That much energy" is not really all that much energy actually. At best we could only hope to extract a billionth of a percent or less, with current technology and for at least a little while to come still.
It's similar to the scale of the effect of humanity putting many large heavy city sized boats on our oceans. This does not displace enough water for there to be any measurable effect on the water line at shore. The fractions are just too small to need to worry about for now.
Re:Environmental issues? (Score:3, Insightful)
Somewhere in the amazon jungle a butterfly has to flap it's wings a lot harder.
To be a more serious the amounts of energy involved in moving this air about are similar to that released by nearly every nuclear weapon on the planet going off at once. That's a LOT of kites to start dragging in that much energy, we really are talking about the effect of slowing down a hurricane by sneezing against the wind.
Re:Major side benefit (Score:3, Insightful)
I think we have enough evidence to draw a conclusion: By the time a green tech gets into actual production it isn't green anymore. The real world at work? Or perhaps we need to understand the underlying truth. Greens don't want us to find innovative new sources of energy to continue our lifestyle, they want to make energy scarce so as to reshape our society along lines THEY find more pleasing. We aren't to get a vote in this, we aren't even supposed to know we have other options because we can't be trusted to make the 'correct' choice.
Here's my explanation for that: that block of people you've just damned for being inconsistent hypocrites, are not a single uniform group.
That is, the people in favour of wind turbines, are still in favour of wind turbines. They're "environmentalists" in the sense that they want sustainable power sources.
The people who oppose wind turbines likely couldn't care less about sustainable power. They care about the pretty view on their favourite countryside hike. They're "environmentalists" in the sense that that view is part of the environment.
So it's not one lobby that can't keep a consistent view. It's many lobbies, and we have to work out either how to keep them all happy, or who we can most afford to piss off.
Re:Major side benefit (Score:3, Insightful)
The best solution would be to simply spread the load a little bit.
Every energy source has it's draw backs, but they're all specific and different problems unique to the energy source. Combustion fuels create waste gasses like CO2. Nuclear creates toxic waste. Dams create huge flooded areas. Solar casts shadows over ecosystems reliant on sunlight. Wind kills birds. If we use a spread of different sources, each problem remains relatively minor and not widespread.
Our problem seems to be putting our faith into single universal methods, creating BIG side effects. We've been getting energy almost exclusively from burning fuels for centuries now, and those waste gasses are now a huge problem. On a smaller scale, China hasn't just built a dam, but built the biggest dam it was possible for them to build- creating a huge environmental impact.
If we'd spread our energy uses among the different sources, none of these impacts would be so disastrous.