Electricity from a flying kite
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Pakistani press publicized in the summer of 2010 that a hobby scientist managed to produce as much as 3 volts direct current by launching a 10 square foot kite.
The young man by the name of Shakeel Amir resides in Shirin Muafi, a village close to the city of Okara. The AFA (NGO) Center of Technology Transfer and Training in the village of Thatta Ghulamka Dhiroka plans another experiment using no source of power at all (prior experiments required electricity!) to improve the results.
As with other NGO projects, the results of the latest experiments are supposed to improve the situation in the rural areas where insufficient technical infrastructure leads to various shortcomings. There is a continuous demand for decentralized power supply due to the fact that no help from the city can be expected.
- Since it's foundation in 1993, NGO has tested and implanted innovations prior to any public attention.
- 1996 first photovoltaic Installation in Punjab in the TGD Women Center
- 1998 Installation of according technology (Solar hot plates and kitchen modules)
- 2000 The project is part of Expo 2000 (voted as Asian advanced technology development)
- 2002 Work involving droplet irrigation for a cucumber project
- 2003 Joint venture between AFA Pakistan and CAT (Centre for appropriate Technology) / Cameroon
- 2004 Workshop regarding Appropriate Technology in Adamghot near Karachi
- 2006 Workshop regarding Appropriate Technology at COMSATS in Abottabad
- 2008 Preparation for a project regarding passive solar architecture and internet radio to broadcast in rural areas.
- 2010 Mud Housing Project participation in Lahore with the AT of AFA's (NGO's) TTTC incl. Wind Mill.
Background information regarding the Technology
Internationally scientists continue to create new forms of generating electricity. Up to this day most of the solutions were ground based. Selected scientist are now considering the sky.
The system is rather simple and easy to understand. A kite is launched and the more wind you have the higher the kite will ascend, spooling a chord off from a reel driving a generator.
Once the kite has reached it's final altitude, it is drawn back by an electric motor that uses less energy than the kite produced during flight. The entire act is computer controlled.
A 64-year old Professor Ockels is the head of the Institute For Sustainable Engineering and Technology at the Technical University in Delft, Netherlands. He is a physicist and has been an astronaut on a space mission in the mid eighties. He has been dreaming about kites generating energy for a long time and believes in the sky as a future power supply.
Ockels and his team have conducted experiments with 100 square feet kites producing as much as 10kW electrical power. Enough to supply 10 households. The scientists believe that high flying kites linked with each other can drive generators producing as much as 100 MW to serve 100.000 households. Ockels envisions 50 or more kites as big as soccer fields flying as high as 3.000 feet.
In other parts of the world scientists are also planning kite projects to produce electrical power. Some of them hope to produce a hundredfold of the global demand.
In 2007 an American company by the name of Makani invested 15 million US dollars to produce energy with flying kites. Makani is a subsidiary of the internet search engine Google. The Italy based company Kitegen plans to launch a number of kites to produce as much as 1 GW of electrical power. The amount of power an average coal-fired power plant would produce.
Labels: Appropriate Technology
posted by S A J Shirazi @ 9:10 AM,
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