On Ireland’s Atlantic edge, something about the size of a small sail hangs in grey sky above a stretch of peat bog.<\/p>\n
It is not a balloon. It is not a drone and it is not a glider.<\/p>\n
It is a fabric wing tethered to the ground on a rope<\/strong>, and the rope is doing all of the work.<\/p>\n The flying part weighs 176 pounds<\/strong>. Nothing under it turns and nothing is bolted into concrete.<\/p>\n So how does pulling on a rope make electricity?<\/p>\n The wing is flown in a continuous figure eight across the sky, crosswind, at an angle that keeps it moving fast.<\/p>\n Speed is the whole point. A wing racing sideways through the air generates far more lift than one sitting still in the same breeze.<\/p>\n That lift becomes pull. The tether hauls down with a force of between 5,500 and 8,800 pounds, unwinding a drum inside a steel box on the ground.<\/p>\n The drum spins a generator. That is the reel out phase<\/strong>, and it runs for about 80 seconds.<\/p>\n Then the control pod hanging under the wing changes its angle so the kite goes nearly limp.<\/p>\n A small motor winds the line back in. Because the wing is barely pulling now, winding costs only a fraction of what the pull just produced.<\/p>\n Twenty seconds later the cycle starts over. Each loop leaves a net gain<\/strong> behind it.<\/p>\n Laid flat on the ground, the wing covers 645 square feet<\/strong>.<\/p>\n All of it, including the sensors and the pod that steers it, comes to 176 pounds. A rigid blade with that kind of reach would weigh tons.<\/p>\n The structure is a hybrid. An inflatable membrane is stretched over a skeleton of twelve hollow fiberglass tubes joined by aluminum connectors.<\/p>\n Fiberglass was picked over carbon fiber because it flexes more and still holds the load.<\/p>\n The rope is Dyneema, a synthetic fiber stronger than steel wire of the same thickness at under a tenth of the weight.<\/p>\n Everything else fits into one 20 foot shipping container. Winch, generator, battery, controls.<\/p>\n A crew can stand the whole rig up on unprepared ground in under 24 hours<\/strong>, and the wing itself gets carried out across the bog by hand.<\/p>\n The site sits outside Bangor Erris in County Mayo, on Atlantic facing bogland picked after a long search, and it is billed as the world’s first designated airborne renewable energy test site.<\/p>\n The operator is Kitepower, a Dutch company spun out of Delft University of Technology, working with RWE and Mayo County Council.<\/p>\n The first flight there was in September 2023.<\/p>\n Over its first year the team logged more than 90 flights<\/strong> and over 100 hours in the air, averaging roughly five flights a week.<\/p>\n The longest single flight ran 5 hours 45 minutes<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The unit flying at the site produces around 30 kilowatts, buffered by a 336 kilowatt hour battery, and it has been taken past 1,300 feet.<\/p>\n The partnership was extended for further testing rather than wound up, and a permanent crew now lives beside the field.<\/p>\n A wing working at 1,150 feet is inside airspace that aircraft use.<\/p>\n Every flight has to be cleared with aviation authorities under airspace rules<\/strong> written long before anyone proposed generating power up there.<\/p>\n Reliability is the harder problem. A conventional turbine turns on bearings refined over decades.<\/p>\n A pod steering a fabric wing through a figure eight in real time, in gusts, at night, is a young class of machine<\/strong>.<\/p>\n A researcher at University College Cork who studies the field puts any meaningful contribution to the grid somewhere in the 2030s.<\/p>\n Nothing airborne is running commercially at scale anywhere, and the offshore wind<\/a> industry has already watched several attempts stall.<\/p>\n Public flight reports<\/a> from the bog are honest about that.<\/p>\n The list of places a kite can reach is close to the list a crane and a concrete truck cannot.<\/p>\n Islands, polar stations, mine sites, disaster relief camps, building jobs and remote outposts, nearly all of them burning diesel today.<\/p>\n A container arrives on a truck and can be flying within a day<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The larger 100 kilowatt version is projected to make 450 megawatt hours a year, which its maker puts at roughly 150 European homes.<\/p>\n It is claimed to use up to 90 percent less material<\/strong> than a conventional installation of similar output.<\/p>\n That matters at the far end too, where retired blades go into landfill as fiberglass nobody can cleanly separate, a disposal question solar panels<\/a> are meeting as well.<\/p>\n One cofounder has already sketched 500 kilowatt containerized kites beyond this one.<\/p>\n For now a rope, a drum and a piece of fabric are still learning the job on a Mayo bog, and the test site<\/a> is logging another season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Ireland’s Atlantic edge, something about the size of a small sail hangs in grey sky above a stretch of peat bog. It is not a balloon. It is not a drone and it is not a glider. It is a fabric wing tethered to the ground on a rope, and the rope is doing all … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":33451,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"airborne wind energy","rank_math_title":"A wind energy kite the size of a small sail climbs to 1,150 feet above a bog in County Mayo on a single rope, and the shipping container anchoring it puts real electricity into the grid below","rank_math_description":"A 176-pound kite on Ireland's Atlantic coast flies to 1,150 feet and pulls a reel hard enough to generate 100 kW with no tower, no blade and no poured con","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How a rope on a drum becomes a generator<\/h2>\n
The wing, the rope and the bog underneath<\/h2>\n
What the flight log at Bangor Erris shows<\/h2>\n
Where the wind energy kite still runs into limits<\/h2>\n
What opens up if the wing keeps flying<\/h2>\n