if you're at all like me this is what you do with the sunny summer weekends in san francisco you build
experimental kite powered hydrofoils
capable of more than thirty knots
and you realize that there is
incredible power in the wind and it can do
amazing things and one day a
vessel not
unlike this will probably break the world speed record
but kites aren't just toys like this kites i'm going to give you a brief history and tell you about the
magnificent future of every child 's favorite plaything
so kites are more than a thousand years old and the chinese used them for military applications and even for lifting men so they knew at that stage they could carry large weights i'm not sure why there is a hole in this particular
these two fellows came along and they were flying kites to develop the control systems that would
ultimatelyenable powered human
flight so this is of course orville and wilbur wright and the wright flyer
and their experiments with kites led to this momentous occasion where we powered up and took off for the first ever twelve second human flight
wrote this seminal paper that was completely ignored in the
journal of
energy about how to use basically an airplane on a piece of string to
generateenormous amounts of electricity
the real key
observation he made is that a free flying wing can sweep through more sky and
generate more power in a unit of time than a fixed wing turbine
so turbines grew and they can now span up to three hundred feet at the hub
height but they can't really go a lot higher and more
height is where the more wind is and more power as much as twice as much
to now we still have an
energycrisis and now we have a
climatecrisis as well
you know so humans
generate about twelve trillion watts or twelve terawatts from
fossil fuels and al gore has
spoken to why we need to hit one of these targets
and in
reality what that means is in the next thirty to forty years we have to make ten trillion watts or more of new clean
energy somehow
the majority of it is in the higher altitudes above three hundred feet where we don't have a technology as yet to get there
so this is the dawn of the new age of kites this is our test site on maui flying across the sky i'm now going to show you the first autonomous
generation of power
by every child 's favorite
plaything as you can tell you need to be a robot to fly this thing for thousands of hours it makes you a little
and here we're
actually generating about ten kilowatts so enough to power probably five united states households with a kite not much larger than this piano
and the real
significant thing here is we're developing the control systems as did the wright brothers that would
enable sustained long
durationflight and it doesn't hurt to do it in a
location like this either
so this is the
equivalent for a kite flier of peeing in the snow that's tracing your name in the sky and this is where we're
actually going so we're beyond the twelve second steps and we're
working towards megawatt scale machines that fly at two thousand feet
and
generate tons of clean
electricity so you ask how big are those machines well this paper plane would be maybe a
so that is audacious you say i agree but audacious is what has happened many times before in history this is a
refrigerator factory churning out airplanes for world
so really this is a story about the audacious plans of young people with these dreams there are many of us i am lucky enough to work with thirty of them and i think we need to support all of the dreams of the kids out there doing these crazy things thank you
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