“Air snake” with a capacity of 1.2 MW exports electricity to the grid by itself (video)

Dragon 12 has a 12-meter wingspan and weighs at least 28 tons. But compared to wind turbines, it is small and extremely easy to install with a single small boat.

The Dragon 12 device from Minesto is underwater but acts like a kite. It uses the buoyancy created by tidal currents to harvest renewable energy. New Atlas writes about it.

Solar energy is at the heart of most renewable energy grid plans, but lunar energy is even more predictable, and a number of different companies are working to commercialize the energy produced by the regular tides.

Minesto's energy generator uses a completely different dynamic approach to energy collection — just as land-based wind-powered kites fly in a figure-eight pattern to accelerate faster than the wind, so does the Dragon underwater. This enables the unit to extract more energy from a given tidal current than other designs, and changes the economic equations for the sites involved, making slower tidal currents worthwhile.

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Dragon 12 has a 12m wingspan and weighs at least 28 tons. But compared to wind turbines, it is small and extremely easy to install with one small boat.

As in any renewable energy project, the key indicator here — LCoE (balanced cost of energy). As for the price, back in 2017, Minesto predicted around $108/MW*h after installing the first hundred megawatts of capacity — further reducing costs to $54/MWh.

Dragon 12, like other tidal devices, will be more efficient in some locations than others, and the Danish Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the cold North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland, offer ideal conditions. Home to almost 55,000 people and more than a million puffins, the Faroe Islands channel tidal currents through a series of narrow channels. This greatly speeds up the water and therefore increases the energy that devices like the Dragon 12 can harvest. That's where the first Dragon was deployed, and on Friday it was connected to the local power grid to start delivering electricity.