Name: 【TED】Saul Griffith: High-altitude wind energy from kites! (Saul Griffith: High-altitude wind energy from kites!)
Uploaded: 2016-10-20T11:18:59.000Z
Duration: 6 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

this is what you do with the sunny summer weekends in San Francisco:

you build experimental kite-powered hydrofoils

And you realize that there is incredible power in the wind,

will probably break the world speed record.

Kites: I'm going to give you a brief history,

and tell you about the magnificent future

So, kites are more than a thousand years old,

and the Chinese used them for military applications,

So they knew at that stage they could carry large weights.

I'm not sure why there is a hole in this particular man.

actually pioneered the use of kites for towing buggies

in races against horse carriages across the English countryside.

all of the great inventors of the time --

even Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, who was flying this kite --

were doing so in the pursuit of aviation.

and they were flying kites to develop the control systems

that would ultimately enable powered human flight.

So this is of course Orville and Wilbur Wright,

And their experiments with kites led to this

momentous occasion, where we powered up and took off for the

And that was fantastic for the future of commercial aviation.

But unfortunately, it relegated kites once again to be considered children's toys.

That was until the 1970s, where we had the last energy crisis.

who lives on the outskirts of San Francisco,

wrote this seminal paper that was completely ignored

about how to use basically an airplane on a piece of string

to generate enormous amounts of electricity.

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,

and more height is where the more wind is, and more power --

So cut to now. We still have an energy crisis,

and now we have a climate crisis as well. You know,

so humans generate about 12 trillion watts,

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 30 to 40 years,

we have to make 10 trillion watts or more of new clean energy somehow.

Wind is the second-largest renewable resource after solar:

3600 terawatts, more than enough to supply humanity 200 times over.

The majority of it is in the higher altitudes, above 300 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.

As you can tell, you need to be a robot to fly this thing for thousands of hours.

And here we're actually generating about 10 kilowatts --

so, enough to power probably five United States households --

with a kite not much larger than this piano.

as did the Wright brothers, that would enable sustained, long-duration flight.

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 --

And we're working towards megawatt-scale machines

that fly at 2000 feet and generate tons of clean electricity.

Well, this paper plane would be maybe a -- oop!

That would be enough to power your cell phone.

If you'd loan me your Gulfstream, I'll rip its wings off and generate you a megawatt.

If you give me a 747, I'll make six megawatts,

which is more than the largest wind turbines today.

And the Spruce Goose would be a 15-megawatt wing.

But audacious is what has happened many times before in history.

Prior to World War II, they were making 1000 planes a year.

With this factory and 100,000 planes a year,

we could make all of America's electricity in about 10 years.

So really this is a story about the audacious plans of young people

I am lucky enough to work with 30 of them.