Bullets:

Bullets:

A Beijing company deployed the world’s first large aerial wind turbine, and is ramping up production to meet demand in China’s coastal and mountain areas.The aerial wind turbine successfully hovered at an altitude of 2,000 meters, and generated electricity to feed to the local power grids.The system is rated at 3 megawatts, equivalent to a medium-sized power plant, and can generate electricity for over factories, or for thousands of homes.

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Report:

Good morning.

China has an all-of-the-above approach to building out new power supplies. They’re all in on nuclear, and building more plants than anyone else. Coal also is critical in China’s power mix. They build more renewable power than the rest of the world combined, and just broke ground on the world’s largest hydro project.

This is an aerial wind turbine, an airship combined with a windmill, could say, and the company that builds them is making them commercially viable. It’s rated to produce three megawatts of electricity, which is sufficient to power large facilities like factories, or power hundreds of homes. It is equivalent to the output from a large solar or wind project, or from a medium-sized power plant.

The company is out of Beijing, and tested the platform in Sichuan at 2,000 meters, where it delivered 385 kilowatt hours of electricity to the local power grid. This is the first megawatt-level airborne wind power system.

Smaller designs have been built and tried. Ten years ago a group out of MIT designed an airborne wind turbine that went to 1,000 feet, a lower altitude. Altaeros Energies is still in business today, but now focusing on other airships, not on power generation.

This model, in China, goes far higher – over 6500 feet, and completed the power generation test. The milestone here was a “stable hover” while operating the power generation system.

The higher you can put these things, the stronger and more consistent the winds are. That’s a big challenge with ground-level wind farms; the intermittent winds. Tethered cables are used to control where they go, and they are the conduit for the electrical power generated by the turbines.

Wind energy increases with the cube of the wind speed, so just slight increases in wind speed result in exponential gains in power generation. The airship is designed to concentrate airflow and guide and compress the wind and improve capture. So several advantages so far—stronger winds are higher up, and if you park this thing a mile up, you can generate a lot more power than a windmill of the same size on the ground. And the design itself is conducive to capturing even more.

The photos are a bit deceptive, as to the size. It is a very large system. And the next advantage is that it’s portable, obviously unlike fixed wind energy facilities. It can go where it’s needed. Some coastal cities and mountain areas already have commitments to try the system, and the company is ramping up production.

This happens a lot to us, when we’re traveling around. I’m in the car and see something and have no idea what it could possible be, I ask around, and nobody else has a clue either. And then a few weeks later we might see something about it in the news. Oh, it’s a giant windmill, that floats high up in the sky. Of course.

Be Good.

**Resources and links:**EIA, China Energy indicatorshttps://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chnChina starts construction of world’s biggest hydropower dam in tibethttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/22/china-starts-construction-of-worlds-biggest-hydropower-dam-in-tibetSome sort of aerial wind turbine generation being tested in chinahttps://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringPorn/comments/1q75874/some_sort_of_aerial_wind_turbine_generation_beingFloating wind turbines bring electricity where it’s neededhttps://www.nsf.gov/news/floating-wind-turbines-bring-electricity-where-itsHigh-flying turbine produces more powerhttps://news.mit.edu/2014/high-flying-turbine-produces-more-power-0515

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