Kite Energy

WorldChanging: There’s no quicker way to show somebody that energy is abundant than taking them out to fly a really big kite. My favourite is a five metre, two-lined parafoil, and with lines only 20 metres high, ten knots of wind will throw you all around the park. Yet from a distance, the kite is merely a tiny speck on the horizon.
So imagine my delight when I learnt that the Beluga Shipping Company will use a massive SkySail to tow a 132 metre MV container ship across the Atlantic Ocean in January.
Ships are a great example of the difficulty in putting abundant energy to use. As the world’s 50,000 merchant container ships cross the ocean they are constantly surrounded by energy: waves soar past, ocean currents channel massive volumes of water (and temperature) around the globe, winds swirl overhead, and of course, the sun bears down. Despite this, most ships carry and burn fossil fuels to reach their destination. Piggy-backing on the plentiful power from one of the abundant forces is an engineering dream, and constitutes an economic and environmental breakthrough.
The breakthrough is that despite being at the peak of oil extraction right now, it’s already cheaper to move the ‘My Beluga Skysail’ vessel with wind power than it is to move it on diesel. To be precise, Beluga expects to save around $1600 on fuel every day – a saving that will have funded the system’s deployment costs in three years.
Kite Powered Ships: Harnessing Abundant Energy [WorldChanging]