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Kite-Powered Ship Launched
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Dec 18, 2007 03:36 AM
from the aeolius-called-left-message dept.
from the aeolius-called-left-message dept.
The Grand Poobah writes "The big-kite technology we discussed last month has officially launched in Hamburg, Germany. Reuters has a writeup of the new technology, which aims to cut fossil fuel use on sea voyages by an estimated 20% by means of a huge computer-controlled kite. The link includes a video."
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Hardware: Football Field-Sized Kite Powers Latest Freighter 251 comments
coondoggie writes to tell us that a new freighter set to launch in December will be receiving a hefty dose of power from a kite the size of a football field. The 460-foot ship, owned by the Beluga shipping company, hopes to see as much as a 50% drop in fuel consumption during optimal conditions. "The SkySails system consists of a towing kite with rope, a launch and recovery system and a control system for the whole operation. The control system acts like the autopitot systems on an aircraft, the company says. Autopilot software sends and receives data about the sail etc to make sure the sail is set at its optimal position. The company also says it provides an optional weather routing system so that ships can sail into optimal wind conditions.The kites typically fly at about 1,000 feet above sea level, thereby tapping winds that can be almost 50% stronger than at the surface. "
Submission: Kite Powered Ship Launched by Anonymous Coward
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It's called reinventing the... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's called reinventing the... (Score:5, Insightful)
- it can be used at these cargo ships normal cruise speed,
- it saves the shipping company $1600 per day
- and it utilizes higher altitude winds,
I would say they have succeeded.Parent
Re:It's called reinventing the... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:It's called reinventing the... (Score:5, Insightful)
The lesson for greenies is of course to find cheaper, more environmentally friendly ways to achieve the same output as fossil fuels.
Raising costs with punitive 'carbon taxes' will earn revulsion and support theories that global warming hysteria is really just a power and money grab.
Developing environmentally friendly AND cheaper, effective solutions will earn their developers lots of money and save the environment at the same time.
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. This kite- it's environmental honey. Develop more things like it.
Parent
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http://xkcd.com/357/ [xkcd.com]
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Strapping kites onto oil tankers will only help perpetuate the outdated, unsustainable economies we rely on today. Developing technologies that save the shipping company $1600/day is a waste of time and effort.
I think I see what you're getting at here, but it seems to me that if the technology were applied to other sea-faring craft such as cargo ships or passenger ferries it could have the same effect. Or if not merely fuel-saving, then it could at least lower power consumption requirements such that a weaker propulsion mechanism based on an alternative energy source would suffice for transportation. I believe that the application of the kite towards oil tankers doesn't mean that it is only applicable to oil tan
Re:We're doing it wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:We're doing it wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:We're doing it wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:We're doing it wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose that some of those predicting the end of the Roman Empire were correct.... but it took several hundred years to happen. In that case, I suppose it gave legitimacy to those doom and gloom experts too.
We don't even have an energy problem. Indeed, all of the problems you are complaining about here is due to an over abundance of energy, not a lack of it. The fact that a doom sayer of the finality of the world like yourself can name off at least 4 different sources of energy that can be tapped and transformed into useful forms needed in modern industrial societies speaks volumes about how much effort is going into identifying useful energy forms.
The one huge problem, if there is one, about energy production is not how to extract the most out of the energy sources, but how to keep idiots from extracting too much from those energy sources at once. You may ask "Huh?" here, but pay close attention.... an explosion is just the rapid release of large quantities of energy at once at a point source.... aka a "bomb". And those kill people == very bad technology (to some people's thinking). This is the primary reason why nuclear energy (both fusion and fission) is the big evil bad guy, in spite of the fact that a nuclear future really is the best way to protect the environment in the long run. Not only for waste disposal, but even for mineral extraction costs (including intangible costs like environmental damage) nuclear fission is several orders of magnitude more efficient than petroleum and coal production techniques. For crying out loud, the typical coal electric generating plant produces far more toxic nuclear waste per kWh than a typical nuclear fission power plant. That is completely discounting silly things like CO2 that are now getting everybody's panties in a bunch. Fusion sources, if developed, are just the icing on the cake and make the argument undeniable.
This still doesn't solve the problem of how you can concentrate energy into a useful and portable source that can be tapped by ordinary people, for things like transportation and commerce. And mass transportation isn't always the solution, as there are legitimate reasons why many people don't want to be in a herd and travel the same route and to the same places that 90% of the rest of humanity is at.
FYI, did you know that when you throw a gallon of gasoline into your automobile, that at the refinery more energy was consumed in the processing of the gasoline than is available for you when you burn that fuel? Most of that processing energy comes in the form of electricity, which the oil refineries get from the same sources that power your light bulbs... but the point is that most fuel sources are just energy concentration mediums. And it is important to separate energy production from energy storage. Until you can develop an energy storage medium that is more efficient than petroleum, we will continue to require petroleum or something very similar for a very long time to come. Lithium ion technology looks very promising at the moment, as are some other interesting energy storage devices. Ethanol is, IMHO, a horribly wasteful energy storage form but at least it is a semi-viable replacement for common uses of petroleum if you absolutely must stop the black fluid mineral extraction processes. And most alcohols don't
Parent
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While I agree that some "hybrid" (as in hybrid car) solutions are useless for tackling climate change, I have to disagree with you here. Ships have a similar problem as airplanes
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Hey, I'd like it if nuclear power took off in commercial vessels. Considering how much fuel those guys burn it would be worth it.
Your thought process precludes incremental improvements, and denigrating this while promoting windpower in the same comment is silly. It is windpower, and some windpower is b
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And apparently developing practical, working examples of alternate forms of propulsion using renewable energy for the ships that we will need in 20 years has no part of that?
GTFO. You're talking about some completely insane timeline to completely change our energy infrastructure -- even if fusion power was perfected today, it would take more than 20 years for us to replace every coal plant on earth, and that still doesn't give
Re:It's called reinventing the... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) $1,600 / day *per ship* savings on fuel costs sounds pretty good to me -- nearly 600k a year. Of course that's a significant saving for a shipping company, look how they've borne down on crew costs to save relatively smaller sums. Assuming an installed cost of $750k, there's a payback time of just a year and a quarter, and that's conservative: fuel prices are heading up which increases the savings, the costs of production will head down due to economies of scale if the tech takes off, and the article notes that larger kites would -- in principle -- deliver larger savings.
2) Why on earth would you make the kite the bridge of the ship? The tether is about 300m long, what's the point of it being 240m instead? When you pull objects along, you attach the tether to the front of them, not the middle -- it's more efficient and it's more stable. Watch a child pull a toy dog along to see this principle in action.
3) They have their own solution to rough weather, and it's simpler than a frigging autonomous flight capability.
4) Lifting a fifty thousand ton ship bodily out of the water with kites doesn't sound like a terribly feasible solution. The hydrofoil idea might possibly be worth pursuing, but I suspect there are good technical engineering reasons for why large freight ships don't currently use this design that would preclude its use even with a kite.
Parent
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I don't know much about the conditions at see (so potentially over-qualified to talk about it on
So they may have re-invented "the really high sail" by removing the mast and putting it on the end of a rope/tether instead, but not just a normal sail.
Re:It's called reinventing the... (Score:5, Informative)
Power kites are quite hard to learn how to control properly. I think the leap in the technology here isn't the wind which, as you point out, has been done before, but the control systems to keep the kite in the air, stable and effective.
Parent
I predict... (Score:4, Interesting)
in other news (Score:4, Funny)
film at 11.
Everything old is new again (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest deal in alternative energy right now is the windmill, which have been used for what, 1,200 years? [wikipedia.org] Now we have a (gasp!) sailing ship! Pretty soon we'll go back to using the electric car [toyota.com] which was very popular in the early days [about.com] of the automobile.
No, basic technologies are not new - what's new are refinements. For example, Linux is a re-implementation of a 35 year old Operating System [levenez.com] having the chief innovation of a license change [gnu.org]. I'm not knocking the quality that Linus has put into the Linux kernel, but Linux is written to be POSIX compliant, so while drivers are nice, Linux is basically no different than any other UNIX but for the license difference.
Innovation can come from some incredibly low-tech, unlikely places. For example, this guy has won numerous awards for sticking a pot inside a pot and filling the middle with wet sand [boingboing.net] - managing to solve a serious problem in Africa for low-cost refrigeration.
I guess what it comes down to is this: Technology is valuable when it works, not when it's complex. There's lots of very, very, very simple technology that nonetheless works very, very, very well.
Re:Everything old is new again (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really. It might be closer to a windmill than a sail... The idea of using the wind for power might be millions of years old, but new ways that do it several orders of magnitude more efficiently, and in significantly different ways, aren't the same tech by any stretch of the imagination.
This is a lot closer to a kite or a parachute. The ONLY similarity is has with a sail is that it happens to be powering a boat in this case. Far more differences than similarities, and I don't hear anyone complaining that sailing ships were just rip-offs of kites...
Eliminating the huge weight, manpower, and most of the wear that was inherent with sails makes this a vastly different product that could well have been a revolution in naval technology (exploration, trade, warfare, etc.) if it was around in the 16th century.
With wind turbines and electric cars you have a point that they aren't really new inventions, but they certainly have been VASTLY refined. In other words, a rocket that can fly to the moon and back isn't an over-sized bit of fireworks, but it's easy to oversimplify anything until it sounds trivial... Hey, a 3GHz dual-core computer is just a bunch of electric switches, and they had those in the 1800s.
This 'kite', however, is decidedly new, by any reasonable metric, and I look forward to seeing if it's actually practical for commercial use on a large scale.
Parent
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Several orders of magnitude more efficient? That sounds very unlikely, given that sailing technology is pretty competitive these days, with competitions like Americas cup where investors are practically standing in lin
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Wind at higher altitude is more consistent and stronger. Part of the reason americas cup boats have such tall high aspect sails
A kite flies back and forth through the air experiencing an increased wind speed compared to static sail
The center of effort for the force from the kite can be placed very low on the boat so that heeling moment is minimised. So no need for a deep keel or long heavy fragile mast.
With the kite retracted the wind propulsion system is hidden away. So reduced winda
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Sometimes, it seems, there are no new ideas. As others have said, what we have here is a glorified sail. Nothing wrong with that, but as fossil fuels become more expensive, we'll find more and more "old tech" make a comeback.
The industrial revolution and the age of enlightenment led us to overconsumption. Defoe's Crusoe is an exemplary of a human being getting in control with the nature - everything is possible with ingenuity and sufficient resources. Sadly the western societies especially have since declined to self-worship rather than co-operation, because we generally are weak before our needs and desires. Combined with individual freedoms the nature was lost into artificiality, and many aligned with a mechanical world-vi
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If that's the implication, could you lay out an objective proof as to why?
This is a sincere question.
Get off my lawn! (Score:4, Funny)
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I predict an increase in the number of yuppies in the crews of ocean going ships.
Am I the only one who feels (Score:3, Interesting)
Hope for humanity... (Score:2, Funny)
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Great start (Score:5, Informative)
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Keel? (Score:3, Insightful)
Military usage (Score:4, Funny)
When fighting enemy warships, a kite ship can get close enough to fire a shot, then the kite kicks in and they move away, out of range of the pursuing enemy ship, all the while firing shots at them. Using this tactic they could easily draw an enemy warship far from their lines and away from possible assistance to an area of the sea where additional friendly warships can be brought to bear upon it.
What next? The Trireme and Galley Slaves? (Score:2)
Not sure how much real use this will be. (Score:3, Interesting)
Can't use it when heading into the wind - can't tack with a kite.
Can't use it when theres no wind.
Also in the video it seemed to be moving around a lot on its mounting pole when furled up even in the slight breeze. How you'd unfurl it in a strong wind without damage to it or its cables I shudder to think.
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Re:Wow. (Score:4, Funny)
- Cold fusion based power plants
- Jet-packs
- Mars terra forming and subsequent colonization
- FTL travel
and Duke Nukem Forever
Parent
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Re:not a great value (Score:5, Insightful)
$725,000 / $1600 per day gives about 450 days before break-even.
Ships have a useful life of 20 to 30 years, so in the end, you wind up about 12 or 13 million ahead, even factoring in a total replacement at mid-life. And this rough calculation is just at (presumably) todays oil prices - when oil is double the price, you're now saving $3200/day and so on.
Plenty of scope for some serious cost savings.
Parent
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z.B. der Drachen (Fluggerät)
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Do you know what the word "dictionary" means?
TWW
Re:Economics look not so good, like awful (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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So:
1. At no point would the ship ever slow down more than it would with current tech.
2. Ships already need to expend energy based on drag so if the path and speed is unchanged so is this effect.
3. With a savings of 1600$ per day the cost of replacing a kite is probably trivial after a few months. The kite is not the primary cost Instillation costs are dominated the cost to retrofit the ship, control software