Interesting Form of Wind Power

[ThomasP]

Don't know how practical this would be in terms of not being damaged and/or breaking free of the tether(s), but definitely an example of outside the box thinking.

China tests world's first megawatt-class flying wind turbine — it generated enough energy to power a house for 2 weeks

A pioneering energy-generating device utilizes reliable wind speeds at an altitude of 6,500 feet (2,000 meters).

www.livescience.com

 

[PETERTHEEATER]

Presumably the lift is provided by helium. How much energy is used to produce that gas.
In order to avoid using a large diameter conductor from the device to the ground the elctrical energy genetated must be transformed to a high voltage?

China does not seem to be concerned with netzero and is happy to generate much of their energy using coal but I could see a use for a device such as this in isolated offgrid communities.

 

[elbmc1969]

Presumably the lift is provided by helium. How much energy is used to produce that gas.
In order to avoid using a large diameter conductor from the device to the ground the elctrical energy genetated must be transformed to a high voltage?

China does not seem to be concerned with netzero and is happy to generate much of their energy using coal but I could see a use for a device such as this in isolated offgrid communities.

Helium requires little energy to produce because it's drilled, like natural gas.

The PRC has become desperate to reduce the use of coal-fired power plants. The air pollution in Beijing, in particular, is intolerable. If nothing else, the leadership doesn't want to live in conditions worse than L.A. in the 50s or The Great Smoke (London), when they know that there are alternatives. There's a point to being the world's largest producer of solar panels.

 

[J_P_C]

Helium requires little energy to produce because it's drilled, like natural gas.

The PRC has become desperate to reduce the use of coal-fired power plants. The air pollution in Beijing, in particular, is intolerable. If nothing else, the leadership doesn't want to live in conditions worse than L.A. in the 50s or The Great Smoke (London), when they know that there are alternatives. There's a point to being the world's largest producer of solar panels.

helium is also freaking expensive and quite scarce, not mentioning that is easily leaking through the most of known materials - basically this factors eliminating it from most of industrial class applications (could be except space exploration and deep diving but here simple helium has no alternatives also hard to call it "industrial" type use)

 

[MIflyer]

How much energy is used to produce that gas.

"Producing" helium (or heileum as the Space Shuttle Program sometimes called it) requires thermonuclear reactions which actually produces vast amounts of energy. This is mainly popular on the Sun, and we'd like to be able to do that as well, but rather less messily. The main source has been wells in Texas. The need to use helium for pressurization was a factor in the phase out of the USAF Atlas ICBM in the mid-1960's. He is still used for pressurization on the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles.

Of course, there is no reason H2 could not be used in a lighter than air vehicle and it could be produced anywhere, either by electrolosis or by directing hot natural gas at a body of water (the usual industrial process).

A big problem with wind power is its sensitivity to weather conditions and using an LTA vehicle instead of a tower increases this concern by at least an order of magnitude.