The British company proposes to extract energy using drones hovering at a height of 15 kilometers.

Yesterday on Habré was published the news about an interesting project of Japanese scientists to supply our planet with energy using solar panels installed on the moon. This project is rather complicated and hardly feasible in the current environment, but there is another similar project that looks simpler to implement. Plus, the project in question does not require flights to the moon or even access to near-Earth space.

It is about soaring at a height of 15 kilometers drones of special design. These drones look like kites, but instead of a “sail” they have a solar panel. As far as it can be understood, the devices float mainly due to screws (I don’t remember, frankly, whether there are rising air currents at such a height). Well, the energy received from the sun's rays drones transmit using microwave radiation to the ground. Among other things, the energy is collected from the air, because the drones are equipped with miniature wind turbines.
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Ground stations convert microwave radiation into electrical energy and accumulate it in batteries.

Of course, such a project has drawbacks. For example, the power of one drone is 50 kW, which means that to supply even a small city, there must be thousands of drones. And the creation of such a number of devices is not cheap. How reliable such a system is, and what losses it may suffer, how often drones will fail - also a question that needs an early answer.

On the other hand, such a system can be used in emergency situations, and not all the time.

The company that is developing the project, plans to put it on Kickstarter. To start the production of drones need 500 thousand dollars, which is very much.



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