1. A radical change of perspective

2. The Kite Gen power plant

3. Scientific papers

4. Future scenarios

Given a fixed optimal aspect ratio of the plant, as the diameter of the circular path at ground level grows, the area swept by the power kites increases to the square, reaching also higher and more powerful winds. Such exponential growth of the total wind power that can be harnessed is the main reason behind building bigger Kite Gen power plants.

And due to the inner modularity of the technology, that foresees the multiplication of single steering units producing energy on a larger circular path, the scalability of the Kite Gen power plants comes without significant structural and cost constraints. In a way, the difficulty in growing the size of a plant can be compared to what it takes, having built an automobile, to build a long line of the same automobiles.

This is the reason why 1 000 MW (1 GW) and larger Kite Gen plants are studied, where the aim is not just increasingly cheaper cost of energy produced, but providing a solution to effectively reach (a not only dream of) a global energy mix where a consistent part of the baseload comes from clean, renewable source: tropospheric wind.

It would be like installing thousands of current wind turbines into the same site, something impossible because of the surface spacing needed to maintain a sufficent efficiency. Kite Gen power plants overcome this limit, each unit exploiting different regions of the huge volume of wind swept by the whole machine.

It has to be added that, in scaling up the dimensions of the plant, one key technology that Kite Gen Research plans to explore is the conversion of mechanical energy into electrical energy through linear magnetic engines in a reversible fashion.

The theoretical boundaries of such configuration appears to be a ring of approx. 25 km diameter, very similar to a railway bridge, which is the base, or technically the stator, on which rotates a mag lev Kite Gen; the tethered high power kites fly automatically at up to 10 km height in a controlled formation, generating a power of more than 60 GW. Right now, however, is deemed that opportunity evaluations will probably suggest to consider power plants of smaller dimensions.