On Ireland’s blustery western seaboard, researchers are gleefully flying giant kites — not for fun, but in the hope of generating renewable electricity and sparking a “revolution” in wind energy.
“We use a kite to capture the wind and a generator at the bottom of it that captures the power,” said Padraic Doherty of Kitepower, the Dutch firm behind the venture.
At its test site in operation since September 2023 near the small town of Bangor Erris, the team transports the vast 60-square-meter kite from a hangar across the lunar-like bogland to a generator. The kite is then attached by a cable tether to the machine and acts like a “yo-yo or fishing reel,” Doherty said.
Photo: AFP
“It gets cast out and flies up, the tether pulls it back in, over and over again, creating energy,” he said, testing the kite’s ropes and pulleys before a flight.
The sparsely populated spot near the stormy Atlantic coast is the world’s first designated airborne renewable energy test site, and although the idea is still small in scale, it could yet prove to be a mighty plan as Ireland seeks to cut its reliance on fossil fuels such as oil and gas.
“We are witnessing a revolution in wind energy,” said Andrei Luca, operations head at Kitepower, a zero-emissions energy solutions spin-off from the Delft University of Technology, a Dutch public university.
“It took nearly 25 years for wind turbines to evolve from 30-kilowatt prototypes to megawatt scale, and decades to offshore wind farms we see today,” he added.
TECHNOLOGY
The system flies autonomously, driven by software developed at the university in the Netherlands, but Doherty acts as the kite’s “pilot” on the ground, monitoring its flight path for efficiency. The kite flies up about 400m and reels in to about 190m, generating about 30 kilowatts for storage.
The force spins “like a dynamo on a bike,” Doherty said, adding that “it generates up to two-and-a-half tonnes of force through each turn.”
The electricity is stored in batteries, similar to solar photovoltaic systems, with the kite able to fully charge a 336-kilowatt-hour battery.
“That’s a meaningful amount of energy, sufficient for powering a remote outpost, a small island, polar station or even a construction site,” Luca said. “Add additional kites and we can power a bigger island.”
MOBILE, FLEXIBLE
According to Doherty, a chief advantage of the kite system is its flexibility and swift start-up capability.
“We can set up in 24 hours and can bring it anywhere, it’s super mobile and doesn’t need expensive, time and energy-consuming turbine foundations to be built,” he said.
A kite system is “way less invasive on the landscape [than wind turbines], produces clean energy and doesn’t need a supply chain of fuel to keep running,” he added.
During January’s Storm Eowyn, which caused widespread and long-lasting power outages in Ireland, the system showed its value in Bangor Erris, Luca said. “Paired with a battery, it provided uninterrupted electricity before, during and after the storm.”
Ireland’s wind energy sector has long been touted as full of potential, but progress on large-scale delivery of onshore and offshore turbines has been held up by planning delays and electricity grid capacity constraints.
GOVERNMENT TARGETS
The Irish government has set ambitious targets for offshore wind energy to deliver 20 gigawatts of energy by 2040 and at least 37 gigawatts by 2050.
Irish wind farms last year provided about one-third of the country’s electricity, said Wind Energy Ireland, a lobby group for the sector. This compares with the UK, where, according to trade association RenewableUK, wind energy from the country’s combined wind farms first reached 20 gigawatts in November 2022.
The ability of airborne wind energy (AWE) systems to harness high-altitude winds with relatively low infrastructure requirements “makes them particularly suitable for remote, offshore or mobile applications,” said Mahdi Salari, an AWE researcher at University College Cork.
CHALLENGES
Kitepower would face challenges on “regulation, safety and system reliability,” but such technology could plug gaps in places where “land availability, costs or logistical constraints hinder the deployment of traditional wind turbines,” he said.
By the 2030s, “I expect AWE to contribute meaningfully to diversified, flexible and distributed renewable energy networks,” he added.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, surpassing the US$600 billion mark for the first time, the central bank said yesterday. Last month, the country’s foreign exchange reserves rose US$5.51 billion from a month earlier to reach US$602.94 billion due to an increase in returns from the central bank’s portfolio management, the movement of other foreign currencies in the portfolio against the US dollar and the bank’s efforts to smooth the volatility of the New Taiwan dollar. Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民)said a rate cut cycle launched by the US Federal Reserve
Handset camera lens maker Largan Precision Co (大立光) on Sunday reported a 6.71 percent year-on-year decline in revenue for the third quarter, despite revenue last month hitting the highest level in 11 months. Third-quarter revenue was NT$17.68 billion (US$581.2 million), compared with NT$18.95 billion a year earlier, the company said in a statement. The figure was in line with Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting Co’s (元大投顧) forecast of NT$17.9 billion, but missed the market consensus estimate of NT$18.97 billion. The third-quarter revenue was a 51.44 percent increase from NT$11.67 billion in the second quarter, as the quarter is usually the peak
Nvidia Corp’s major server production partner Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) reported 10.99 percent year-on-year growth in quarterly sales, signaling healthy demand for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. Revenue totaled NT$2.06 trillion (US$67.72 billion) in the last quarter, in line with analysts’ projections, a company statement said. On a quarterly basis, revenue was up 14.47 percent. Hon Hai’s businesses cover four primary product segments: cloud and networking, smart consumer electronics, computing, and components and other products. Last quarter, “cloud and networking products delivered strong growth, components and other products demonstrated significant growth, while smart consumer electronics and computing products slightly declined,” compared with the
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of