Just like wind turbines along the Altamont pass along 580, Mongabay, a leading environmental science and conservation news site, says fleets of kites could harvest enough energy from high-altitude winds to power major cities from high altitude winds. The research comes from the Carnegie Institution and California State University.
Based on 28 years of data from the National Center for Environmental Prediction and the Department of Energy, researchers found that regions best suited for harvesting energy from high-flying kites are New York, Tokyo, Seoul, and other population centers in the eastern U.S. and East Asia.
“There is a huge amount of energy available in high altitude winds,” said coauthor Ken Caldeira. “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.”
New York has the highest average high-altitude wind power density of any U.S. city, with an average wind power density of up to 16 kilowatts per square meter.
Several technologies have been proposed to harvest these high altitude winds, including tethered, kite-like turbines that would be floated to the altitude of the jet streams at an altitude of 20,000-50,000 feet and transmit up to 40 megawatts of electricity to the ground via the tether. But battery storage technology is still a bottleneck for storing energy for those days when the wind just don’t blow.