Jetstream Could Fill Global Energy Needs
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 05. 8.07
Treehugger readers will be familiar with some of the ideas shown above, like the Magenn and the flying rotors. They are both attempts at putting wind powered generators up in the jetstream, six miles up, where the wind blows all the time at up to 310 MPH. According to the San Francisco Chronicle:
By lofting generators into the upper atmosphere, scientists theorize they could capture the power of the jet stream and transmit the electricity along cables back to Earth.
A wind machine, floated into such a monstrous force, would transmit electricity on aluminum or copper cables -- or through invisible microwave beams -- down to power grids, where it would be distributed to homes and businesses. Unlike ground-based wind generators, the high-altitude devices would be too high to be heard and barely visible against the blue sky.
"My calculations show that if we could just tap into 1 percent of the energy in high-altitude winds, it would be enough to power all civilization. The whole planet!" said atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University.
There are still problems to be solved:
"Creating a much larger, commercially viable system envisioned by scientists would take millions of dollars of research. Scientists need to figure out the structural materials that could stand up to the jet stream's buffeting winds and find a way to adjust the generator's position as the jet stream meanders back and forth across the sky.
Perhaps more vexing is determining the appropriate size and composition of the cable that would act like the string on a child's kite to keep the machine from blowing away while it functions as an electrical transmission line." ::San Francisco Chronicle
Seems to me the number one problem is an airplane running into one of those high-power cables or crossing some high-power microwave beam (or that beam going haywire and frying people on the ground or something).
It's quite easy to solve - place these generators out of major routes, and then establish no fly zones, like there are al over the country.
It's quite easy to solve - place these generators out of major routes, and then establish no fly zones, like there are al over the country.
Except of course that jetstreams are widely used by airlines to increase fuel efficiency and decrease travel times, so it would seem pretty counterproductive to have "no fly zones" in the areas now most widely used by airlines. And it also seems that would be hard to enforce, since jetstreams aren't fixed objects like military bases.
It's a creative thought but not really practical, especially considering we have other options.
Lol if they are going to suggest microwaves why dont they just beam solar energy from orbit down to the powerplant like in simcity 2000
...And six miles of copper cable falls to the ground, for whatever reason.
*CRACK!*
That is one whipcrack I do NOT want to be under. But I suppose the fall of a space elevator would be worse...
The biggest problem is the changing route of the jet stream. Everything I have seen says that the jet stream is changing due to increasing global temperatures and they aren’t sure where it will settle.
I’m not sure where jetliners travel, but I wonder if there are some portions of the jet stream that aren’t used for air traffic. Even if there aren’t, the wind engines would have a pretty big radar profile and they should be easy for jetliners to avoid. Assuming that there are some areas which can be used by floating wind engines, they could be anchored to off-shore oil rigs (thus employing some of the oil workers who will hopefully be unemployed in a clean energy economy).
The microwave may be the best option since tethers couldn't keep the devices in the wildly wandering stream, and it would avoid the disasters previous people mentioned. Planes flying through the waves probably would be ok because the waves would be very weak and spread widely over a large area. Only when a dish concentrated them again at the ground, would the power density be high.
The problem I wonder about is tinkering with a major force of weather. The energy piped down to us is taken out of the jetstream, weakening it and causing who-knows-what kind of effects. The global ocean circulation offers similar potential, but the consequences of slowing that are supposed to be dire (it is slowing already because the melting polar ice is changing the salt concentration that is part of the driving force.)
The jet stream changes all the time. Do not inject global warming hysteria into already largely unpredictable phenomenon.
Damon, I would personally like to quell your fears about us removing too much energy from the jet-stream and ocean currents. Such a feat is physically impossible in this application.
What impact will this technology have on the jetstream? We can't assume that it will have no impact otherwise we would be making the same mistake we always have. This is a no-starter in my opinion.