Let's go fly a kite!

Remember building your first kite out of bits of bamboo and binbags? Remember attempting to get it airborne in scarcely a breath of wind, your younger brother repeatedly hurling the crude contraption into the sky as you fled in the opposite direction, hairy string in hand, desperately trying to generate some vertical thrust? No? Well maybe that's just me then...

Anyway, suffice to say that kite technology has, ahem, moved on a little since those pioneering early days in the Gillespie back garden (we were of course standing on the shoulders of illustrious Chinese kite-making giants). I was recently getting excited about 'SkySails' after my slow travel trip and the video clip here shows how huge flexi-foil style kites could help bring down carbon emissions from shipping. Who'd have thought it that we might get some climate change relief by going back to sail proving once again there's nothing new under the sun...

...or is there? Flipping through the Sunday papers I was gobsmacked to see this piece in the Observer on 'Kitegen'. The brilliantly named Dutch scientist Wubbo Ockels behind the technology reckons that kite powered turbines could be a significant source of renewable wind energy. Flying kites at heights of up to 800m (where windspeeds are much higher) could be scaled up to a half a gigawatt output with electricity generated costing as little as 4p per kilowatt hour (half the cost of 'conventional' windpower and comparable with coal...are you listening EoN?). There's a video of the technology here also from the Guardian website (which is why there's an irritating advert first on the clip). Kites to help solve climate change? BRING. IT. ON. (Although don't get my little brother to launch them - he was rubbish at it)

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