One of the most popular solarpunk images is taking off in reality. The first recorded mention of solarpunk was in this 2008 blog. The author was inspired by the conceptual image of a cargo ship being pulled by a huge modern kite.
Following on from that the Jessica Woulfe’s artwork depicting blimp turbines (pictured above) won the Atomhawk solarpunk art competition in 2019. Since then Airborne Wind Energy Systems or AWES (love this acronym!) have become some of the most popular solarpunk imagery.
Many have thought this was just a protopian dream but as Matt Ferell explored in this recent video, AWES are getting much closer to reality. As Matt explains, a flying turbine has been successfully deployed by the company Kitepower in Ireland, poweringing the local town of Bangor.
I first read about these as being under development in a kids’ science magazine in like 2008. I’ve been waiting to see this for a while now, amazing stuff.
This is awesome. I love that they use wind power and are also white like clouds.
I’ve never seen this iconic image before
Congrats on your first
What is the draw, versus a fan on a stick?
There’s a lot of reasons we don’t do blimps in general.
Kite on a cable seems to require less specialized manufacturing than enormous fan blades on a very tall pole. There’s no fire risk from the blades spinning too fast when no power is needed.
I suppose this introduced the risk of cables getting tangled. I also wonder how high the kite needs to get to reach a layer of ever present wind and avoid needing a human to come spool it back in.
The article claims (though without citation except promotional material) that they’re smaller ground footprint, cheaper, and much more portable. Also they can generate more electricity per unit because they can be higher altitude with more turbulence. Interesting concept, and I think as many novel alternatives as possible that can all work in tandem are useful!
While not impossible, these claims feel like they’re on the wrong side of the AM/FM divide between actual machines and fucking magic.
“Smaller ground footprint” seems particularly odd, when the above-ground portion of a wind turbine is like a thirty-story shed.
They show ones tethered to a shipping container, which is like 10x less area than a wind turbine base. But since the kite has to be released in an arbitrary direction and has to be able to land in a somewhat arbitrary location, the de facto land area is probably much larger. You don’t want the kite to land on top of a sheep or a solar panel.
Portability is probably true but kind of niche. Most of the time you want power generation at the same place for decades. Maybe these could serve as emergency power generators, but with them being dependent on the wind you can’t rely on them for emergency power either, which means you still want other forms. So all the kites could do is provide emergency power in situations that would be okay without power.
Maybe nomadic people could carry a small one with them. The video also mentions putting them on ships, which might honestly be the best application, saving a decent chunk of fuel if the ship happens to be going in approximately the same direction as the wind. (Though you would need to replace the engine to make it a hybrid).
As for them being cheaper, I could see the material costs being lower, but with all those quickly moving and torquing parts I would expect them to wear out a lot sooner. They can also crash into the ground quite easily. They take a lot more labor to set up and operate, even if you trust its steering software not to crash the kite (into something important) once it’s up there.
Another factor with cost is the amount of waste they produce. Wind turbines are mostly metal, which can be derusted electrically. Meanwhile these kites seem to be mostly made of plastic, which is a form of unburnt fossil fuel that sheds poison until you burn it. Plastic is cheap in the current pro-poison economy, but it shouldn’t be. Also non-poison materials tend to be heavier that might make the design less viable and less portable.
Still, they could make sense for 0.01% of power generation by kWh or something. Putting them on ocean-faring ships seems plasible.
