Photograph courtesy SkySails
"Let's go fly a kite, up to the highest height," the characters of Mary Poppins sing in Walt Disney's 1964 film. For SkySails, a company headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, high-flying, huge kites are the basis of a business aiming to transform the shipping industry.
Already, SkySails has attracted about 50 million euros ($67.6 million) in investment for its automated towing kite systems, which include onboard launch, recovery, and steering systems, plus a rope, control pod, and towing kite that swoops in figure-eights hundreds of meters in the air in front of the ship to generate propulsion power.
Fewer than 10 ships have been outfitted with the technology to date. Yet using wind propulsion to eliminate even a portion of cargo ships' fossil fuel needs could be an important step for an industry responsible for some 3.3 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2007. And the International Maritime Organization estimates emissions from international shipping, which made up 2.7 percent of global human-caused CO2 emissions in 2007, could double or triple by 2050.
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