Innovative Energy Solution? Go Fly A Kite!

This week, TED Talks posted a presentation by Saul Griffith that pushed a lot of my personal “geek” buttons – making electrical power with kites! All of us here at ThoughtOffice have a little bit of granola-crunching hippie inside us. We’ve shared many conversations about renewable energy, and leaving the planet a little better than we found it. Now, I’ll get off the pulpit, and let you watch the video:

It always does my heart good to see people making new ideas from old ones. That’s a lot of what brainstorming is all about – taking an existing concept, like a kite, and looking at it in a new way – seeing what you can make out of it. Let’s take a look at another innovative application of kites to the problem of generating wind power:

Granted, I don’t expect that kite power will be “the” solution to our current energy problem. I suspect it will be just one of many useful ways that we can generate power in the near future. But it’s scalable, transportable, and could create much-needed manufacturing jobs in the USA. What’s not to like?

Do you have any stories to share, of new ideas from old? What are your favorite “old” technologies that you think could make a difference today? Feel free to share your thoughts below.

David Lockman
Product Specialist
ThoughtOffice Corporation