A Different Kind of Wind Power: Damon Vander Lind at TEDxEmbryRiddle 

There's no difference in the behaviour of the wind, and besides, you couldn't drive a ship with it.

um.. also why not photovoltaics on the turbine wing surfaces?

We are all brilliant aren't we? Why don't the people that have studied fluid mechanics for years, or better yet made it their careers, listen to people who know nothing about those things in the youtube comments?

you need to maintain clearance between the blade tips and the tower. Canards, would take up that clearance, unless the tips faced away from the tower. That could cause flutter, and instability. Both huge enemies of turbine blades.

@@johnhopkins6260 They may as well: it won't add much weight.

Jacapo Castellano The only "test" you need is the cost of wind energy right now in Texas, 3 cents a kWatt-hr, cheaper than COAL!!!

@@rstevewarmorycom Yeah, but unreliable.

@@Muehlenbauer No, that's the lifetime cost of maintenance TOO!

you don't generate money instantly from R&D lol!

Bo Diddly -- The tethered airplane can fly figure-eight patterns, which prevents any accumulated twisting of the wire.

A Wire Tether swinging through the Earth's Magnet field will yield a current. That will go where?????? To draw down static electricity and lightening from the clouds and blow up everything around! Remember the Shuttle tether that did the same thing and created so much current it fried and snapped the tether?? Yea???...NO!!!

id like to be correct on this by the team...?

Probably not, at least I assume that.

It's just that hydropower is superior to wind.

Nobody knows tides better than Lord Kelvin, then merely Sir William Thomson, did when he built analogue machines to predict the tides in quite a fair number of places in Britain, but as to energy from them he expressed the belief that it wasn't worth the rental of the land you'd have to use to get it. Geothermal is different, if you are near enough the Ring of Fire. I cannot understand why Hawai'i bothers with the unpredictable, undispatchable wind.

You should be able to make gigawatts from a field full of Indians then.

+capoman1 The fan blades brake against the wind generating power. The glider/kite is moving at around 150 miles an hour making the blades spin extremely fast.

Also, the electricity generated from the turbines goes down the string that holds the kite down.

It's 2 wires sending power captured to batteries on earth, in the final system anyway.

apagoogoo -- These powerplanes are meant to fly at high altitude, above most clouds and even into the jet streams, because the strongest and most constant winds are there. It's not that helpful to add weight and complexity to them, when they will tap into wind energy far more concentrated than solar energy, with no downtime for night.

@@YodaWhat If they fly that high, how do they manage the tether?

@@lcloverviewman5755 Funny, no answer to that question...I was wondering the same thing.

paint

dsouzand Okay, we'll just turn your power off then when we run out of oil.

Albert Rogers -- Tsk, tsk, such negativity. Is that a _strawman argument,_ or did you just contradict yourself? Let me straighten you out... Providing backup Power for short-term variations does not require a massive amount of stored Energy. Long-term variations in power leave long times to bring online those back-up systems which are good for that kind of load. Also, quite apart from the usual wind variations you were probably thinking about, this kind of flying system will operate at high altitudes where the wind is much stronger and more constant. When widely deployed, some of them will always be in some windy place. When wind power is in excess of need and/or beyond what their local grid can accept, water can be electrolyzed and the hydrogen put into the natural gas pipeline network, or used to synthesize zero-net emission hydrocarbons with CO2 from the atmosphere. Heck, these flying powerplants can even carry wireless communication equipment to augment and back-up the terrestrial communications networks, and do so at far lower cost than commsats in space.

Not if you have it offshore where nothing needs that space..

Ted Rees The Washington Post Could wind power ever meet the world’s energy needs? By Brad Plumer September 10, 2012 At the moment, wind power supplies about 4.1 percent of electric power in the United States. Still a bit player. Yet there's a whole lot of untapped wind left in the world. Wind whipping through the Great Plains. Wind gusting off the shores. Wind circulating high up in the sky. So what would happen if we tried to harvest all of that wind? We'd have enough energy to power the world. At least in theory. A new study published this week in Nature Climate Change finds that there's enough wind potential both on the Earth's surface and up in the atmosphere to power human civilization 100 times over. Right now, humans use about 18 terawatts of power worldwide. And, technically, the study found, we could extract about 400 terawatts of wind power from the Earth's surface and 1,800 terawatts of power from the upper atmosphere. This isn't what's likely - just what's possible. As Kate Marvel, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, explains, this paper mainly looks at wind power's maximum potential. "We were looking at the geophysical limits of what the Earth could handle," Marvel says. "We didn't necessarily restrict our study to what was feasible." (Marvel coauthored the study with Ken Caldeira and Ben Kravitz of the Carnegie Institution for Science.)

MassDynamic -- Mostly these powerplanes will fly higher than birds, even into the Jet Streams, where winds are fastest. Birds do not fly that high, except for very rare cases where they happen to migrate through high mountain passes, like in the Himalayas.

They also can be installed en mass in the ocean away from the coast, where few birds ever go.

y challenge thermodynamics now? i think ur talking in the quantum level, not real world macro physics.

but their approach is indeed ingenious and provides better control

Sheesh No, they produce a kiloWatt continuous for each 3 cents invested in them. THAT'S CHEAPER THAN COAL!!!!!

I hate that myself.

Those sounds we make filling the large silences we hear in speaking. Are NOT necessary. The pauses are NOT long to the audience. Don't waste your time with UM etc. Concentrate on the phrase . No one will notice the pause. And they can concentrate on what you are saying. It even sounds better in your head... Good Luck.

When a person can not speak proper english they lose credibility because if they don't get something a simple as turban is a hat and a Turbine is for creating torque then how can they understand something as complicated as power from the wind. This can not make enough power to drive anything so is just a toy.

valgeir80 He is nervous. You would be too.

um ok uh!

I started noticing it as soon as I read ur comment

Not as bad as people who say "right?" after every sentence. (See: The Young Turks)

Give the guy a break, I was pretty captivated in this rather radical idea. Good effort in different thinking from a seemingly great bunch of people.

Anyone can find problems, the trick is finding solutions. That is what they are trying to to. You are perfectly content to criticize him while you use dirty depleting power sources? Seems foolish to me.

T Yomama What is foolish is thinking wind power is green or free. 'Dirty' fuel consumption goes up when industrial wind turbines are added to the portfolio. Pollution is horrendous within miles of industrial wind turbines. You are wasting your time if you call me a liar or something of that tone about that; I live among them now. We have a destructive electric field in the ground now that is killing the burrowing animals - industrial wind turbines are deadly to life in general, and who will be next? You did not read my entire post. My suggestions were valid. However, here is an excellent suggestion - don't be so quick to call coal dirty and don't be so quick to throw away what does work. Before you criticize people like me ask yourself "what if they are right"? We have already asked ourselves that about your opinion, so we have one up on you. We all came into this being taught 'wind is green'. So, ask me some real questions. That is the way you and I will communicate, because right now you simply appear to be one of the people destroying other people's lives for too high a cost for something that hasn't and still doesn't produce the real power everyone needs. Land is a finite resource. Industrial wind turbines use enormous quantities of land and poison that land in the process. Would a re-engineering of the wind turbine techniques take into account the waste of land, the pollution produced by the technology or the destruction from the grounding of the chaos wind energy produces? There are a lot of missing pieces right now. Viable solutions are being cast to the wind (literally). That is why I recommend looking at the whole puzzle from new angles - perhaps more PhDs and more thinking and a little less breaking people's backs with bad ideas.

T Yomama One more thing. Do you really think you are benefiting from the wind industry? Your comments are belittling the very real problems with wind energy and the way that wind industry diverts from what needs to get done.

+WolfeSandy I am not an ignorant tree hugger... In fact my income is derived purely from oil production. I work for an oil company. I realize that there are issues with wind power but I have , as an electrician, worked in lots of power generation plants in my past in construction, they are non-renewable dirty power. I am sorry that you were lied to by corrupt slick salesman that had your neighborhood convinced that these would be OK to have around you, but wind, solar, hydro (via rivers or tides) power have to be researched. I question your line about dead burrowing animals... They may have moved on due to noise and vibration but there is no way these mills are energizing your ground. You sound plainly ignorant there. Aside from that I have no doubt they are a hateful thing to live under. I simply questioned you on solutions. To say "find a solution and reverse-engineer" is a joke. What is the solution?

+WolfeSandy one more thing from me also, we are burning around 95 million barrels of oil PER DAY... we need to find alternatives. We need to dramatically increase clean renewable energy production, and equally decrease inefficient usage. We need major breakthroughs in all aspects, how we are living now is not sustainable.