Wind Energy

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1. Turbine-less wind generator- how does it work?
2. 5 kW wind turbine kit- under $6k in parts, without tower . This appears to be the most affordable package available anywhere for serious wind energy production.

Kite Power

You can generate a lot of energy from a kite tethered to a generator on the ground. The kite tugs on the tether, which spins a turbine and generates electricity. All the machinery can be kept at ground level; only the sail is airborne.

We can probably buy an off-the-shelf power kite. Here is a 5m² one for $166. Here is a 2.7m² one for $14. This seems to be a top-of-the-range one - it's $600 for 6.5m². Alternatively, we could try to build our own kite.

This would need to be attached to the open-source electric motor we're designing, and a microcontroller.

Off-site resources

1. Ecoble article: Wind Power Generated From Kites
2. at Delft University of Technology:Kite Power Could Generate Energy for 100,000 Homes
3. See video - High Altitude Wind Power
4. Autopilot Arduino board for drones
5. Saul Griffith on kites as the future of renewable energy
6. Academic project assessing feasibility of kite power (link is to a 109 page pdf file). Gives technical details of the mechanism. Estimates 500W from a 2m² kite if the average wind speed in 8m/s
7. http://climatelab.org/Airborne_Wind_Energy_Systems
8. WPI Kite Power Wiki - "dedicated to developing a new renewable energy technology - Wind Power from Kites. In this concept, large kites tethered to the ground are used to extract power from the wind. Kites can extract power more economically than wind turbines because they fly at higher heights than turbines can operate."

Airborne turbines

1. Wind driven apparatus for power generation - expired patent for a tethered airborne turbine. This design generates power at the turbine and transmits it to the ground.

Wind Power with Hydraulic Transmission

Back in the golden age of the Dutch, their booming economy was powered by wind in all sorts of incarnations (see article from Low-tech Magazine - Wind powered factories: history (and future) of industrial windmills). Wind provided a lot of energy but one big problem was that this energy had to be used at the time that it occurred, with very little ability to store it for later use. Now in the 21st century, we can use hydraulic implementations to solve this problem. As builders of the GVCS, we are quite familiar with hydraulic systems from projects such as LifeTrac. A hydraulic transmission can also be used for stationary applications and powerd by wind. The "mill" that harvests the wind is coupled to water pumps, generating hydrostatic pressure. With a storage reservoir (water tank at higher level), this energy is available at any time, powering hydraulic motors.

• Patent (granted 2008): "Wind turbine with hydraulic transmission"