Airborne Wind Turbines- The next big Renewable Energy Product

I welcome to this video in which we are going to explore an exciting new product in the renewable energy portfolio that is beginning to see commercialization we are talking about airborne wind turbines they are a reality and they're here to stay all the cell's energy files we influenced by people towards engineering and technology for a better more sustainable world subscribe today for notification to videos and information feed you might have heard about airborne wind turbines and you might have seen a picture or two of them looking at them one feels that they are one of those futuristic technologies that will never fulfill their promise the reality is there is work going on concurrently in many areas of the world not for prototype testing but for incorporating them for commercial use interestingly the concept of airborne wind turbines is not new and was first presented by myeloid in the 1970s but it is only recently that it has been picked up and contrary to the popular belief they are non expensive it has been reported that energy can be generated through them for as low as 3 cents per kilowatt-hour airborne wind turbines sound complicated compared to your run-of-the-mill horizontal axis wind turbines from their name we get a sense of a wind turbine that is mounted on a flying machine is it really that complicated if so why are we pursuing them firstly if we look at the why well we all know that wind is the second largest renewable resource after Sun and get powered humanity 200 times over then its current requirements becomes more consistent with altitude not only that but the quality of wind is also much better with little induced turbulence in it at higher altitudes and also the wind speed is much higher it has to be noted that with the passage of time we are adding more and more renewables in our energy mix with this comes a problem of variability of resource when energy is intermittent and inconsistent particularly close to ground level however we can get access to more consistent wind with increasing altitude therefore harnessing wind and higher altitude promises many more hours of wind energy which would reduce the variability factor if you look at the planetary boundary layer we find that wind blowing close to the surface of the earth is much slower and heights of 300 meters and above we start approaching very close to free stream velocity of wind and the wind speed at that height can be almost double the value than at 10 meters about the surface furthermore as the wind at such high levels is far away from ground-based obstacles it has less turbulence in it note that turbulence is undesirable because it can induce damaging vibrations in the blade so this explains the impedance of collecting energy from higher altitude but building towers for this purpose is expensive and impractical and not to mention extremely time-consuming and it is for this reason that we use the simplest of flying machines to lift the wind turbines up these flying machines are tethered the purpose of the tether in most cases is twofold not only the tether keeps the flying machine anchored to a certain area but it also serves as a power supply line various designs have emerged for airborne wind turbines some are lighter than air systems while others are heavier than air systems an example of lighter than air system is the boston-based LTRO so energy is turbine that uses a helium-filled balloon shout to lift a wind turbine into the air it transfers the resultant power down to a base station through the same cables that are used to control the shout it has to be understood that power has a cubic relationship with wind speed in other words if the wind speed gets doubled as it does in higher altitudes then we can generate eight times more power using the same length of propeller blades and hence twith airborne wind turbines even with smaller wind turbine blades we are able to generate a lot more energy moreover we don't need that your systems that we do in conventional turbines for making them face the wind this also helps to keep the airborne wind turbines simpler another type of design is the fixed-wing Airport wind turbine which operates with a greater degree of control Makani a company owned by Google has produced this type of turbine in which the turbine blades can also act as a propeller to lift the system up when needed likewise the propellers can also help to land the whole system the fixed-wing airborne wind turbines have very high lift-to-drag ratio just like in dieter's tether may be used to supply the power to the wind turbine and initially when it is taking off but once it is airborne and is flying in its loop pattern the same tether feeds the energy to the ground power station more simple airborne systems also exists such as the fabric wing based airborne wind turbines in Scotland a company called KPS has developed a dual kite system in this system the tension in the tether created by the lift of the kite spools it out from the drum on the ground that is connected to a generator and as a result electricity is created this system is being tested across various sites in Scotland the beauty of airborne wind turbine system is that they can be deployed in very little time the whole systems can wait 10 less than their ground-mounted counterparts and so our easy transport they can be set up very quickly in areas affected by disaster at present we have airborne wind turbines that can produce as much as six hundred kilowatts but developers are working towards scaling up the output to megawatt levels let's hope this technology flourishes and we get energy from devices with a substantially lower footprint and with more consistency and with this the video is concluded if you learn something from the video make sure you hit the like button subscribe if you haven't already thank you for your attention

Channel: Synergy Files

Views: 12,822

Keywords: Airbone Wind Turbines, Kite Energy, Flying Wind Turbines, Google's airborne wind turbine, Cost of energy from airborne wind, Best renewable energy product in 2018

Id: xyJ9R9UsUWE

Length: 6min 29sec (389 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 15 2018