Have you ever noticed that the higher you fly your kite the harder it pulls against your hand? Well, a scientific innovation is gearing up to take advantage of this observation in an extreme way.

Magenn Power of Ontario, Canada, has discovered that placing wind generators at around 1,000 feet can create cheap and plentiful electricity by accessing small jet streams that move more consistenty and with more force than ground winds. This could be the basis for wind farms that almost never go offline.

The electricity will be cheap to generate at around 20 cents per kWh, and it will also be low impact in many ways. The generators can be launched almost anywhere and aren’t limited to high-wind regions, a limitation of standard wind farms. They can be placed conveniently wherever there’s a power line, rather than requiring new transmission lines like some renewable energy sources. This allows us to generate electricity in more places, and to move it less distance between generation and use. Since getting electricity from the source to the user is a huge part of the renewable energy battle, this is a great aspect of this development.

One excellent part of this design is that it will be so high up and blend so well, it won’t be a visual nuisance.

Perhaps the activity which first allowed Ben Franklin to harness electricity will be responsible for bailing us out of the environmental mess we created with that knowledge.