'Let's go fly a kite'

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-metre (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.

The sparsely populated spot near the stormy Atlantic coast is the world's first designated airborne renewable energy test site.

And although the idea is still small in scale, it could yet prove to be a mighty plan as Ireland seeks to cut its reliance on fossil fuels such as oil and gas.

"We are witnessing a revolution in wind energy," said Andrei Luca, operations head at Kitepower, a zero-emissions energy solutions spin-off from the Delft University of Technology.

"It took nearly 25 years for wind turbines to evolve from 30 kilowatt prototypes to megawatt scale, and decades to offshore wind farms we see today," he added.

The system flies autonomously, driven by software developed at the university in the Netherlands, but Doherty acts as the kite's "pilot" on the ground, monitoring its flight path for efficiency.

The kite flies up around 400 metres (1,300 feet) and reels in to about 190 metres, generating around 30 kilowatts for storage. AFP