Floating Wind Farms

[Jeff Gerke]

I read an article about harnessing the power of the jet stream winds by floating massive kites to 30,000 feet or so and tethering them to NYC and Tokyo.

I imagined that they would probably be some combination of balloon and kite, because they'd need some way of staying aloft if the kite got out of kilter. I imagined that air traffic control would have to create no-fly corridors around all the high-voltage and massively thick power cables coming down from these floating wind farms.

Then I imagined that they would need wind farmers. I thought it would be cool for there to be one guy (or maybe a skeleton crew) who lived up on these platforms to service them.

I guess he'd have to wear a pressurized suit all the time--like a space suit? Or maybe he'd have to have some kind of pressurized pod car that he could ride around in. Maybe like one of those multi-legged walking robots that NASA is working on for space station repair.

Then I figured he'd need some way to get from kite to kite. Maybe an enclosed cable car? What about an escape pod to get down?

I'm just imagining what it would be like to live and work at these altitudes and with these incredible winds lashing you and blasting everything all the time.

Might make for a cool setup for a story. Like the hardest, most dangerous thing to do is go from one kite platform to the next, but of course the villain has captured the girl and taken her to another platform and our hero must get across without the use of his pod car.

Fun stuff.

Jeff

[Christian Soldier]

Hmm... neat idea. It would work especially well in a steam punk style novel. Some day I'd like to write something in that genre.

[scholar]

Ben Schumacher's The Pasadena Rule (a serial novel over at Ray Gun Revival) touches on upper atmospheric work, although that takes place on a derrigible-type ship in Venus upper atmosphere. Not exactly like what we're talking about here, it does provide possibilities.

[Jeff Gerke]

kewl

[tris]

Ooohh I like this idea! My son spent a year working on wind turbines, climbing those towers. Due to safety regulations the workers could only climb two towers a day. They said the stress on the heart was like climbing two miles straight up.

Later he switched to being a desk jockey ...the guy who monitors the towers and then sends a repairman out to fix the problem.

[torainfor]

Here's one possibility:

rainwrites.livejournal.com/11927.html

[Jeff Gerke]

Very cool.

I'm no engineer, but in my design you augment the kite/windfoil with helium-filled balloons around the platform's edge like a skirt or a baby floatation device.

The downlink cable wouldn't have to be rigid to keep it aloft. The helium would do that if the windfoil didn't.

And Tris, very cool about your son. Last week I met someone else whose son now runs a wind farm of these big turbines. He used to climb up the inside of the towers to do maintenance. Weird and interesting.

Jeff

[tris]

It's a lot more dangerous than it looks. One of the youngsters who graduated the year after my son lost his hand doing maintenance on those towers. It's one of the reasons Wes opted for the desk jockey job -- he had a close call with a power wrench.

Meanwhile...back on the farm....couldn't you keep the thing aloft with some sort of antigrav device? Or maybe adapt the principles used by those floating oil derricks? Wouldn't gas filled balloons tempt lightening bolts or some other type of friction induced problem?

I keep seeing something like the flying platforms in Sky Captain.

[Jeff Gerke]

Oh, really? Gas-filled balloons attract lightning? I didn't know that. Why does that happen?

Jeff

[tonylavoie]

I wasn't going to jump on this bandwagon, but this evening while gassing up the van I was looking up at a beautiful summer sky, contemplating the purpling cirrus above already grey stratus, and thinking about how high up those torn wisps really were. That jostled this thread out of a hidden niche in my brain, which fed itself into the gears and began spinning out a potential story.

I think I may give this a whirl!

[metalikhan]

I'm curious how these might be stabilized in severe weather such as tornadoes, hurricanes, or microbursts. Would that kind of weather also produce power surges coming through the cables?
Would the wind farmers have some weather controlling capabilities?

[Jeff Gerke]

Awesome that you're going for it, Tony!

And great questions, metal. As for answers, will "Duh, I dunno" work? Perhaps the cables can be reeled in or out to move the platforms out of harm's way. Maybe they can even land.

Jeff

[tonylavoie]

Done! "Wind Farm Annie" sits at about 5,700 words. Needs some spit and polish, but it came out pretty good, if I do say so myself. I moved the farm to Titan and made it a single kite two square kilometers in area.

I may post some of it here for critique once I get it where I like it.

Thanks for the idea, Jeff!

[tris]

Jeff, recall your history.. Ben Franklin and his kites. You've got balloons either tethered by cables floating above the thing, or underneath supporting something that's got a lot of metal in it. High in the atmosphere. Either way you've got something that's going to appeal to all those little lightening bolts.

[Jeff Gerke]

Yes, and I would think they would use that to their advantage. Lightning rods to harness those bolts and add them to the electricity generated by the blades.

And Tony, way to go! How about submitting it to Anomalous Fiction? (See the thread by that name over in the Space Bar section.

Jeff