On a recent day in August in a field near Munich, Germany, a group of engineers launched a kite-like electric plane into the air and watched for the first time as it flew in figure eights in the sky. The device is one of a handful to take a different approach to wind energy: Instead of a traditional wind turbine with a massive tower and huge blades (that’s anchored to the ground), it shrinks the system into a tiny footprint and sends it into the air.
“The most important factor is that we need 10 times less material, so we can reduce costs quite dramatically,” says Florian Bauer, co-CEO of KiteKraft, the German startup developing the technology, which recently completed a stint at the tech accelerator Y Combinator. The cost could be as little as half that of conventional wind energy. The carbon footprint of building the devices is also lower.
As the kite flies autonomously, driven by the wind, eight small onboard rotors turn and generate energy that is sent down a thin tether back to the ground. In essence, Bauer says, it does the same work as the tips of the blades on large wind turbines, which convert the most energy in the system because they move the greatest distance as they’re pushed by the wind. But the new technology, which came out of research at the Technical University of Munich, does that work without the same need for massive infrastructure.After tweaking its current prototype, the company plans to begin pilot tests in microgrids. It will use that data to help prepare for larger installations. “Once you figure out how to make it cost-efficiently, how to make the software so that everything works well together, we just need to scale up the kite,” says Bauer.
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