Acoustic impact of airborne wind energy technology on the environment

The number of the renewable energy systems is continually growing as a consequence of the increasing energy deficit. Wind energy is one of the most promising types of the renewable energies, therefore, there is no wonder that many airborne wind energy harvesting systems are available today. The goal of the airborne wind energy systems (AWES) is to harvest energy from the upper-boundary layers thus ensuring more permanent renewable energy source by decreasing the influence of the weather on the working period of the wind technologies. But like all man made devices, AWES also have impacts on our environment which is emphatic regarding the damages additional to the current impacts. The questions are: what is the environmental footprint of this technology; and what is the specific environmental footprint of the prototypes? To answer these questions, firstly a sufficiently well developed prototype is needed to study the effects on the environment. On examining the literature, it is observed that acoustic impact is the most notable impact of the AWES. Due to the lack of data, a set up to acquire the noise emission data from the system and also to compare the acoustic level with the conventional wind turbines and a few house-devices was developed. In the end, the first results about the acoustic impact of an airborne wind energy system were obtained. The predominant acoustic source proves to be the flying kite, ahead of the generator and the tether. Comparing it with a conventional wind turbine ensures us about the environmental friendly being. Consequently, the airborne wind energy systems are one step closer for commercial exploitation with my result which prove with numbers that the technology has factually low-environmental acoustic impact.