Here is an innovative, eco-friendly and sufficiently cost effective way to return to wind-powered shipping, as sail ship designs have often failed on various factors, and mostly that they have to rely on unpredictable weather.
And above all, hike in oil prices and climate change and pollution factors have encouraged both a California-based company KiteShip and a Germany-based SkySails to come up with the environment-friendly concept – It’s flying a kite for propelling a ship.
True, neither company is proposing redundancy of engines with the use of a kite, but this added propulsion will save a considerable amount of fuel. SkySails used a towing kite of only 80-square-meters, propelling the 800-ton Beufort five knots in low winds.
