Wind Energy With Airborne Wind Turbines

In Mark Moore's world, long nanotubes reach into the clouds, serving at once to tether a turbine-vehicle flying at 2,000 feet, or 10,000 feet, or 30,000 feet (610, 3,050 and 9,150 meters); and also to conduct the power that vehicle can harvest from the wind back to Earth.

Aloft might be a funnel-shaped blimp with a turbine at its back; or a balloon with vanes that rotate; a truss-braced wing; a parachute; a kite. Any and all of them are ideas being considered by nascent renewable energy industry that is flexing its imagination.

Moore, who works as an aerospace engineer, centering his focus on advance concepts in the Systems Analysis Branch at NASA's Langley Research Center, is using a $100,000 grant from the federal government to research what it will take to judge the value of any of those ideas.

NASA - An Answer to Green Energy Could Be in the Air