Could hanging wind turbines make any sense?
Dear all, an idea is haunting me since a couple of months which may be a bit off-topic, but related to AWE, so I would like to tap your combined expertise to find out whether (and why) this is completely crazy and doomed, or already old and described somewhere else (where?), or if it is indeed an idea that may have potential. Also please let me know if this is not the right place to discuss the idea and tell me where it should be moved if there is a better place.
I am aware of the well-know arguments in favor of AWE (better winds, potentially less material & lower cost, less interference with nature and people living nearby), but I also observe that AWE is incredibly hard to implement in real life. My explanation is simple: Tapping wind in high altitude has huge potential, but building scalable and robust devices that fly under often adverse conditions is also extremely hard, which makes it immensely challenging to compete against the tremendous successes of main stream wind energy which has undergone decades of optimization and scaling.
My proposal: a compromise and maybe an intermediate step toward AWE could be to try and reach high altitudes without actually flying.
The next best thing I can think of is to hang a WT from a support that is already in high altitudes, such as a steel cable spanned between mountain tops (like in aerial lifts) or between poles/masts/towers, held by guy-wires if needed.
The idea would be that on one such cable we could have several or even many, perhaps smaller wind turbines that hang down, but may move sideways in the wind. The cable could also support electrical wires that bring the harvested energy down to earth. I think the idea is compatible with quite a number of shapes the turbines may have, including VAWTs, laddermills, some variant of Doug Selsam’s superturbines or anything else one could dream of. In all cases, I see it as an advantage that there is no need to work against gravity, but gravity can be our friend, and even if there is no wind, the devices, however they may look like, do not need to be landed but can just hang around waiting for the next opportunity to generate electricity. In my view that might take out just enough complexity to make the whole thing feasible in a not-so-distant future (given my age and the urgency of the matter I want to focus on things I may still see working in the coming two decades). A hanging WT with the possibility to move/bend sideways could also help to address one of the drawbacks of VAWT, namely the inability to be turned out of the wind if it is too strong.
Has anything like this ever been described or worked out? Are there even patents or practical explorations? Or is this idea completely dead in the water for obvious reasons I just do not manage to see? Could someone please help me out?
Thanks a lot for your opinions on this!