9 July 2009

Want more power? Go fly a kite

High flying kites may someday power up the bright lights of New York.

Believe it or not, a new study identifies New York as a prime location for exploiting high-altitude winds, which globally contain enough energy to meet world demand 100 times over, said researchers at the Carnegie Institution and California State University.

The regions best suited for harvesting this energy match with population centers in the eastern U.S. and East Asia, but fluctuating wind strength still presents a challenge for exploiting this energy source on a large scale.

Using 28 years of data from the National Center for Environmental Prediction and the U.S. Department of Energy, Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology and Cristina Archer of California State University, Chico, compiled a global survey of wind energy available at high altitudes in the atmosphere. The researchers assessed potential for wind power in terms of “wind power density,” which takes into account wind speed and air density at different altitudes.

“There is a huge amount of energy available in high altitude winds,” said Caldeira, a co-author of the study. “These winds blow much more strongly and steadily than near-surface winds, but you need to go get up miles to get a big advantage. Ideally, you would like to be up near the jet streams, around 30,000 feet.”

Jet streams are meandering belts of fast winds at altitudes between 20,000 and 50,000 feet that shift seasonally, but otherwise are persistent features in the atmosphere. Jet stream winds are generally steadier and 10 times faster than winds near the ground, making them a potentially vast and dependable source of energy. Several technological schemes are in the offing to harvest this energy, including tethered, kite-like wind turbines that would loft to the jet streams. These high tech kites could generate up to 40 megawatts of electricity by current designs, and it would transmit to the ground via the tether.

“We found the highest wind power densities over Japan and eastern China, the eastern coast of the United States, southern Australia, and north-eastern Africa,” said Archer, the lead author of the study. “The median values in these areas are greater than 10 kilowatts per square meter. This is unthinkable near the ground, where even the best locations have usually less than one kilowatt per square meter.”

Included in the analysis were assessments of high altitude wind energy for the world’s five largest cities: Tokyo, New York, Sao Paulo, Seoul, and Mexico City.

“For cities that are affected by polar jet streams such as Tokyo, Seoul, and New York, the high-altitude resource is phenomenal,” Archer said. “New York, which has the highest average high-altitude wind power density of any U.S. city, has an average wind power density of up to 16 kilowatts per square meter.”

Tokyo and Seoul also have high wind power density because they feel the affect of the East Asian jet stream. Since Mexico City and Sao Paulo are at tropical latitudes, they rarely get the polar jet streams and occasionally get the weaker sub-tropical jets. As a result, they have lower wind power densities than the other three cities.

“While there is enough power in these high altitude winds to power all of modern civilization, at any specific location, there are still times when the winds do not blow,” Caldeira said. Even over the best areas, the wind would fail about 5% of the time.

“This means that you either need back-up power, massive amounts of energy storage, or a continental or even global scale electricity grid to assure power availability. So, while high-altitude wind may ultimately prove to be a major energy source, it requires substantial infrastructure.”

For related information, go to www.isa.org/manufacturing_automation.