BANGOR: On Ireland’s blustery western seaboard researchers are gleefully flying giant kites — not for fun but in the hope of generating renewable electricity and sparking a “revolution” in wind energy.
“We use a kite to capture the wind and a generator at the bottom of it that captures the power,” Padraic Doherty of Kitepower, the Dutch firm behind the venture, told AFP.
At its test site in operation since September 2023 near the small town of Bangor Erris, the team transports the vast 60-square-meter (645,000-square-feet) kite from a hangar across the lunar-like bogland to a generator.
The kite is then attached by a cable tether to the machine and acts like a “yo-yo or fishing reel,” Doherty said.
“It gets cast out and flies up, the tether pulls it back in, over and over again, creating energy,” he said, testing the kite’s ropes and pulleys before a flight.
