SkySails Power says it is developing wind power systems that can be used to tap into the enormous energy potential of high-altitude winds on an industrial scale.
Developer for SkySails Power, a kite-based wind generator system, says it consists of five main components: a free flying kite with rope, a launch and recosystem, an automated control system, a generator for producing electrical power and a support platform.
SkySails Power operates at altitudes between 200 and 800m. It can be installed on conventional offshore foundations and on floating platforms. That way the SkySails Power system can also be secured quickly and easily at water depths of down to 700 meters using traditional anchoring technologies and readily available offshore support vessels.
Energy is generated as the wind pulls the rope from a drum connected to a generator. A return phase begins once the rope extendes to its maximum length.
The kite is then flown in a position with a low pull force. This is when the generator acts as a motor and reels in the rope until its extended length is short enough for the next energy-generation phase. This action consumes only a fraction of the power generated during the power phase. The residual energy is fed into the electrical power grid.
A few details on the SkySail equipment.
SkySails Power also works onshore. Mobile units can be used as stand-alone generators to provide electricity, or fresh water through seawater desalination, or both. This patented towing kite for cargo ships has been proven in the tough day-to-day use on board seagoing vessels. In good wind conditions, it can replace up to 2 MW from the main engine, which saves ships up to 10 tons of fuel oil a day.
SkySails is the only company in the world that now offers industrial products for using abundant high-altitude winds. The generator also benefits from the company’s broad and global patent portfolio that includes some 300 patents issued or applied for, in 16 patent families.
SkySails GMBh
www.Skysails.info/English/power
Filed Under: News, Offshore wind, Projects, Turbines
Sun Wu paints a very strange one-sided picture in his comment. First off, no one should doubt that upper wind beyond wind towers is a fantastic resource hundreds of times more powerful than the towers can reach.
There is no doubt the SkySails systems exist (Wu: “not a single independent photo”) and in fact do considerably displace oil use in favorable conditions. The thousands of independent witmesses worldwide to SkySails test operations include a near-miss with a small aircraft decesending through clouds that made avaition news. I worked with SkySails’ competitor, KiteShip, and can assure readers the power of ship kites is truly monstruous. Cargil is SkySails’ first outside buyer, hardly a fly-by-night player, and its trial ship is about to begin operations.
Of course SkySails needs commercial revenue, and cutting costs in a recession is normal, but Wu makes this common reality sound sinister.
I personally know or know of hundreds of Kite Energy developers and analysts. Who is Sun Wu, and how did he get such a skewed negative immpression of Airborne Wind Energy? No R&D player is perfect, but SkySails has much to admire.
Skysails Power is referring experience of Skysails Marine…Skysails Marine is via Beluga Skysails directly linked especially to all Media activities of Niels Stolberg, former owner of Beluga Shipping who is charged for betrayal in a scale of 800-900 Million.
It looks like Skysails Marine has never sold a single Kite-System on anything close to market-conform conditions.
There is not a single independent photo of any of the 4 only, ever with Skysails equipped merchant vessels BBC (ex Beluga)Skysails, Theseus, Michael A or Maartje Theadora, nor any independent source of any fuel-saving in daily shipping use!
Skysails has massive financial problems at the moment, having never sold a single system half of the empoyees had recently to leave the company…incidently just before this Skysails started a new media-campagne related to a technology that has only created doubts in the past ten years…
Skysails needs money…