Laddermill – Kites as Natural Power Generator

Kites is a traditional toy from China 2500 years ago. Now beside as a child toy, our creative guys from Delft University of Technology invented Laddermill, a technology that elevated kites as our alternative of power using strong winds, and it could potentially power up to 100,000 homes!

Never thought a traditional toy could be so useful for our future world. Beside it won’t eat lots of space, a 10 square meter kite can produce 10 kilowatts of power (around 10 homes) when it set flying in the sky.

Although this technology rely bluntly on the wind blows, it’s the most efficient technology until today since the kite’s material is obviously inexpensive, and we can both save the ground from pollution and grounded power generators (wind, nuclear, water, etc) by using the big blue sky as our friendly natural generator.

Here is a demonstration video from Guardian.co.uk:

“The kites used in the laddermill, generally called “kiteplanes”, combine the ascension characteristics of kites with the descension characteristics of aircraft. By creating a large loop of kiteplanes ascending and descending, a rotation can be created. In turn, this rotation can be coupled to a generator to create energy. The loop of kiteplanes can ultimately go up to 30.000 feet, which would generate approximately 100MW.”

– Delft University of Technology

I guess this technology can be improved again such as providing a solar-based power generator on the kite for generating power while at sunny day. I really hope this technology could be a real stuff in the upcoming years so we can solves a lot of troubles occurred because of the limited energy.

( via inHabitat )