Flying kites saves world, thank Google

Is that over the top? You decide for yourself. I’m just kind of blown away by the latest I, Cringely column. PBS columnist Bob Cringely has put together a team for an X-prize-style competition intended to stimulate innovation for a lunar mission. In the course of his team’s research, they came across proposals for generating cheap electricity from huge tethered kites, drawing energy from the powerful high-atmosphere winds. Read the column for the links and implications, but essentially the possibility is there to completely replace all current forms of generating electricity, and ending almost all need to use oil. The political, economic and environmental implications are plainly enormous…

The man proponent of this idea, a New Zealander, now works for a California-based company – whose main investor is… Google.

According to the article:

According to [the]figures, then, to completely replace the one million megawatts of electricity generated in the U.S. annually by a total of 16,000 generators of various types would require 10,000 of those 100-megawatt tethered flying wings.

That’s not many kites at all — enough to require approximately 3,600 square miles of territory, or about the size of Puerto Rico.

A quick search on Google suggests that:

Chinese experts estimate that China’s annual electricity requirements will increase to 4,400 TWh by 2020.

China Clean Energy Program

Now, it’s Saturday morning and I haven’t had enough coffee, so I’m not going to bother doing the sums, but I suspect that China has enough unused land – in the Gobi, perhaps? – to fly enough of these kites to meet its energy needs completely. And oh, wouldn’t it be delicious for China to establish energy security by flying kites! Hahaha, they could certainly afford to buy or manufacture as many as necessary – it might even help the US’ balance of payment with China, who knows…

Picture source: therefromhere on Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.