Italian oil and gas support firm Saipem has announced it will invest in kite energy.
The Milan-headquartered firm confirmed last night it had signed an agreement to support the development, construction and commercialisation of a technology to produce electricity from high altitude wind.
KiteGen will look to harness the high altitude winds to produce up to three megawatts (MW) of energy.
The Italian firm’s investment amount in KiteGen has not been disclosed.
The electricity generated by the kites would be generated at a lower cost, granting access to green energy to a greater number of people.
The generators can also be positioned at a shorter distance from each other than traditional wind turbines, thus obtaining more energy while taking up less space.
A spokeswoman for Saipem said: “KiteGen is at the forefront of the industry and has been a pioneer in the generation of power from kites since the early 2000s.
“From among other operators present on the international landscape who are developing high altitude wind devices, Saipem has chosen to support the KiteGen solution on the basis of an in-depth evaluation of its strong points: namely, it has patented all of the possible valid deep offshore architectures of the tropospheric wind farm which are of particular interest to Saipem.”
