Sometimes engineering proposals are just gee whiz stuff. Just to show that you are capable of thinking outside the box. They don't have to have much to do with practicality. The hazard to air navigation is enough to scuttle this idea let alone the liability considerations of falling stuff. Just try to erect a tower and see the restraints and then imagine what would happen should you decide you want to hang this apparatus several km in the sky.
We used to have sayings to describe this -- Such as "Here's a neat idea --Course it's as practical as airbrakes on an ant but still neat". Well, megawatt turbines way up in the sky would qualify as one of these. Neat.
Kirk
TarynToo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
TarynToo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Sep 11, 2005, at 3:43 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I suspect that large arrays of wind farms would have an effect similar
> to forests. We've chopped down a lot of forests over tha last few
> hundred
> years, so this doesn't worry me.
>
> Tidal power would slow the earth's rotation a little faster than it is
> slowing anyway from friction - probably not a big deal.
>
> Removing a significant fraction of energy from say the Gulf Stream
> strikes me as asking for trouble.
>
> Regarding jet streams, I would be worried if it were possible. They
> wiggle around so much that I can't imagine any practical method of
> tapping their energy.
I remember some blue sky stuff that proposed wind turbines hanging from
high altitude balloons, anchored by long tethers. I suppose the tethers
were supposed to carry current to the ground, though I'm now struck by
the weight of a few miles of high tension copper or aluminum line. As
far as staying in the jet stream, It seems like it would be trivial to
design a self-steering system like that used for singlehand sailing. If
the tether's anchor points were far enough apart, the system could
probably swing a few miles north and south and around a hundred degrees
or more of the compass, tracking the strongest winds. I think the jet
stream shifts hundreds of miles, so I don't know what that would be
worth.
Anyway it was this kind of big scale extraction that seemed like it
could have devastating consequences. Of course you'd need millions of
acres of ground level turbines to extract the kind of energy that a
wind farm hanging in the jet stream might capture.
But I remember reading about this and the proposals to hang big blades
in the gulf stream and thinking, "Oh Jeez! Another massive engineering
project with wildly unpredictable side effects!
Taryn
http://ornae.com/
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