This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I wonder what happens to the world when we take this energy from the wind? Like what are the effects of harvesting wind power?
It will impact weather patterns and severity. I’ve certainly not done the work on how much, nor do I really have a grasp on the scales involved, so that’s mostly a meaningless statement, but I can say with confidence the impact will be real. Just like dams affecting rivers, icecap mass affecting heat reflection, and solar panels increasing local temperatures.
Given that one of the impacts of global climate change has been increased weather severity and chaos, I am not afraid of positing that reducing the severity and chaos of the jet streams could be a good thing.
Similarly, there are some interesting projects going on surrounding the use of aerogel and other materials that could help focus sunlight at the top of the oceans, where evaporation can actually occur, that are focused on creating clean drinking water—and while I think this is a good end unto itself, a nice side benefit would be less solar energy reaching the ocean and raising the body temperature.
For once, it’s cool to hear about proposed industrial projects and their side effects and they’re maybe positive, instead of “well that sounds like it’s going to leech heavy metals into the surrounding community”
Of course, aerogel is horrible to work with and clogs if it doesn’t break, and nobody else has solved the problem of scaling up and dealing with the steam getting in the way. On the lightweight flying jet stream turbine front, well, I’ve been following development for 8 years and nobody has even solved the ‘limited supply of helium leaking away into space’ problem for starters. And it’s hard making an efficient generator so lightweight that it can fly. So we don’t have to worry about them potentially improving global weather severity just yet. Or potentially devastating our remaining populations of migratory birds!
Say what you will at least China seems produce some much needed tech in exchange for selling their people to capitalism, the latter which almost all countries do but in exchange for funnelling the 99.99 % of the revenue to billionaires and/or war (pulled the stats out of my hass).
Neat.
Any real reason you can't fill them with hydrogen? A fire can't start inside the bubble, because there's no oxygen. If a fire starts on the outer surface, then it doesn't really matter if it's hydrogen or not. It's also cheaper and slightly better at lifting. There is some more danger with handling it on the ground, but you should be able to mitigate that with safety procedures.
Yes the Hindenburg disaster had more to do with the flammable paint used than the hydrogen inside it. But the safety procedures when working with on the ground may be more expensive than just using helium.
Cities are going to start looking like San Fransokyo (Big Hero 6) soon. Seems like an excellent idea though. If it really gets pursued, I wonder how it will interact with air travel, since I would imagine you would need no fly zones around these, at least at a certain height.
It's a novel approach, but the Chinese aren't the only ones trying to harvest energy from high winds: https://skysails-power.com/how-power-kites-work/
That looks complicated and frankly kind of stupid. Imagine trying to get something like that working without having an engineer standing by that can get everything fixed once it crashes down or something else like that happens.
Very cool, and definitely worth switching too where it makes sense.
But there is no mention of cost, so it probably won't be cost competitive with regular wind for a while, which sucks.
But the silver lining is that this is among the first of this type of power generation, and it will only get better and more efficient as the tech is built upon.
They did mention 30% cost savings. (these claims are easy to exaggerate though) While already useful scale, the advantages would grow with higher scale and high volume automated production.
This looks like a good way to bring power to a remote area, and China has lots of those.
