Everyone has heard the tale of Benjamin Franklin’s innovative
experiment: he flew a kite in a thunderstorm in order to demonstrate the presence of electricity. Though we don't know how genuine this legend is,
Franklin helped lay the foundation for batteries, the electric motor, the lightbulb, and the true nature of electricity. While he used a kite to harness electricity from lightning, we normally think of kites as merely entertainment on a windy day. However, in recent years, researchers have used mechanical kites to harness electricity from the wind in jet streams,
30000 feet above the Earth’s surface. While Franklin wasn’t the first to encounter electricity, he expanded our understanding of its potential as an energy source; likewise, while we already capture some wind power with windmills on the ground, we are now greatly expanding skyward our ability to utilize the untapped potential of atmospheric winds. The procedure to obtain “electricity in the air” is simple: the kite is connected to a cable, then flown high enough to reach the jet streams. After that, the kite goes against the wind, and that resistance creates kinetic energy, which is then transformed into electricity. The next step is crucial; the electricity is sent down the cable to a distribution grid. “The wind power density tells you how much wind energy would flow through a wind turbine,” Caldeira said.
He had studied patterns of wind in the atmosphere, and hypothesized that
Wind is the Cure
By Vamsi Karra
6th period
11-23-14
the ideal locations for the kite would be Japan, east China, south Australia,
NW Africa, and the east coast of the United States (specifically New York).
“At any moment, the winds in high-altitude jet streams hold roughly 100 times more energy than all the electricity being consumed on Earth, according to a study by Stanford environmental and climate scientists
Cristina Archer and Ken Caldeira” says Christine Blackman. Many companies believe that this project will be promising, so they’re trying build prototypes of kites of their own. This is illustrated by Langley, who developed a turbine, which takes the shape of a figure 8, or by Magenn
Power’s blimp, and even by Sydney’s University of Technology’s turbine , which is designed to operate like a quadcopter and its rotors keep spinning to harness wind power. Even NASA has faith in wind turbine-like kites. Even though it will take several years before the wind turbine is perfected, the end result will outweigh the time and effort put in; the turbine would create a “warm light for all mankind to share…” as Dr.
Stephen Wells described it. Researchers had the same doubts and the same hopes for windmills, but the potential outweighed the risk involved by investing a lot of time, effort, and, of course, millions of dollars. Even if the turbine-like kites experience the same level of success as windmills, the amount of energy produced in comparison to windmills would be ten
