Growth in high altitude wind

Explosive growth in high altitude wind energy

So below is a graph showing my tally of institutions, i.e. companies and universities, working actively on high altitude wind energy. I'm including Marine propulsion. When I have the time I'll try and do a similar thing for investment and for people employed. Note that the figure for 2010 will doubtless grow as I find out about projects that I have been hitherto ignorant of and as new projects get going.

Big news from China

China's first high altitude wind energy project has just been publicly announced.

Worth 400m yuan, or $58m dollars, this article mentions 100,000kW or 100 MW which seems too large scale for a single device, will this be the first HAWP windfarm?

The article says this:


On “2009 International Clean Energy Summit Forum” held last October, Dr. Zhang introduced his core technology principle: the kite ascends like a glider by virtue of wind, generating pull, thus pulling cables, and driving generators to generate electricity; when the kite ascends to the maximum height, the angle of the wings of the kite will be adjusted by the control system to make it descend with its own weight. Then it ascends again to supply electricity, and repeats.  


This seems to suggest that the project is for a relatively simple AOA mediated pumping system, generating on the ground, with no dynamic flying, but details are very thin. The article mentions wind tunnel test facilities. Projected costs per kWh are projected to be 0.22yuwn/kWh vs 0.36yuwn/kWh as a regional average (coal dominated), which would be very impressive at such a large scale given the immaturity of the technology.



This is really interesting and I'm looking forward to see some details, as the lead scientist mentioned-Dr Zhang, has no publications relating to HAWP and I can find no reference to the summit he is supposed to have presented at. The investors Pre-ipo captial partners, have a Chinese only website so no accessible details there either.


Thanks to Joe Faust for this news.