Company Wants To Put Power Plants In the Sky 223
Zothecula writes "Harvesting power from the wind and the sun is nothing new. We've seen flying wind turbines and solar power plants that aim to provide clean renewable energy. UK-based New Wave Energy has a bolder idea in the works. The company plans to build the first high altitude aerial power plant, using networks of unmanned drones that can harvest energy from multiple sources and transmit it wirelessly to receiving stations on the ground."
Re:Wake me when it makes more power than it consum (Score:2, Interesting)
But what if the power plant is run by incompetent Ukrainian communists, didn't think of that did you!
Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
There's really no point in flying solar cells, they don't work any better than down on Earth, and they shade what's under just the same. It's quite pointless, if you ask me. If you're going to fly something, use the flying aspect of it to generate power. What a let-down.
IMHO the way of using flying-anything for power has been demonstrated by Makani Power [makanipower.com]. I somehow trust Makani's engineering a tad better. They've been a bit more open about their engineering process, and they have some pretty damn good talent. Oh, and their areal power density (per are of flying "stuff") is at least order of magnitude better than an ideal 100% efficient solar cell would be. So, meh. Big meh.
Skeptic (Score:2, Interesting)
That idea seems practicable only for small amount of power, far away from any city.
Re:Wake me when it makes more power than it consum (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes the tech, especially today's designs, are safe.
They're still designed on the same principles as the bomb-making reactors of the 1950s. There's still a danger in a really really bad screw-up and they produce an awful lot of very nasty waste product (this is by design - they were meant for making bombs, remember).
We've got newer designs that are inherently safe (ie. they fail to a safe state) and don't produce all the bomb-making residues. Trouble is, governments want no part of funding the R&D costs these days and financing them through private investors makes them a hundred times more expensive (it's a long term project so they won't bother investing unless they get a return on their money 20 years from now which is a hundred times their initial investment).
Re:Wake me when it makes more power than it consum (Score:2, Interesting)
There's a difference between accepting that there is always risk, even in a very safe and carefully-monitored setting (e.g., commercial airline flights), and putting trust in a system that has demonstrated severe incompetence (Fukushima nuclear power plant). Fukushima was an old design, yes. But even when the risk from a tsunami became increasingly obvious in recent decades as a result of studying historical tsunami in the region, they did not adequately prepare, contrary to other nuclear power plants in the region. It was badly managed. They did things on the cheap instead of doing them well.
It's not a question of people setting unreasonable expectations of perfect safety. It's people questioning whether it can be done safely when cost-cutting is considered more important than safety even when an avoidable risk becomes obvious. That would be like running an airline, and when the FAA advisories come out because of previous mechanical issues or human issues that caused crashes, you do nothing.