Scientists have taken the childhood pastime of flying kites to new heights in search of renewable power.

Wind farm turbine windmills stand 80 meters high and deal with winds that average 5 kilometers a minute. Winds 800 meters above the earth average 7 Km a minute, a substantial increase, but it would be impractical to build a windmill that tall.

The solution is using kites to drive turbines and not the fan blades of windmills.

A number of companies in Europe and North America have heavily invested money and research into high tech kites to capture wind power as an energy source.

Google’s philanthropic division has just invested 10 million dollars into Makani, a US kite company that is attempting to tap into high altitude winds.

“We need to use all the energy supplies that are offered to us by nature, we need diversity and kites are….intriguing,” says Wubbo Ockels, a professor of sustainable energy at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Ockels believes that kites are an efficient way to reap the enormous energy in the wind that moves a kilometer or more above the earth’s surface, where winds carry hundreds of times more energy than on the ground.

The theory of kite power is basic. Wind keeps the kites aloft and constantly rising pulling a cable that is anchored to a turbine on the ground. The kite is pulled in and then allowed to rise again. This yoyo effect turns the turbine creating power.

Other systems have kites attached to ground based turntables. A computer tunes the the angle of the kites aloft keeping the turntable turbines in constant motion.

An Italian company, Kitegen, has designed a system that could generate a gigawatt of power, the same amount of power generated by a standard coal-fired power station, enough electricity for over 100 thousand homes.

Kitegen have attracted investment from a Turin utility company AEM to cover 40 percent for a prototype and to sign on as a technical partner. This is the first time that the utility, which is a long way from Italy’s prime windmill coastal zones, has invested in a project of this type.

“When you first see it you have to smile, because it’s a bit funny looking,” said Andrea Ponta, an engineer at AEM. “But the more you examine it, you see the idea is sound and the technology is already available.”

In order to meet Italy’s commitments to meet the European Unions Renewable Energy Directive the nation has until 2010 to provide 22 percent of its energy supply from renewable sources.

Financial assessments estimate that Kitegen could produce a gigawatt of power at a cost of just 1.5 euros per megawatt hour. The average cost to produce the same amount of energy in Europe is currently 43 euros per megawatt hour.

“It’s a fascinating project for the amount of power it promises and the low cost,” said Luciano Pirazzi, who studies renewable energy for the Italian government agency ENEA.

A British Wind Energy Association spokesman acknowledges that kite projects design to capture jet stream and high-altitude winds have, “vast potential that could be harnessed with the technology now available.”

Experts say that Kite technology has great potential and that it can be placed in remote locations or even at sea.

“We could easily supply our electricity demand from offshore, even with the demands on sea such as shipping, fishing and defence radar,” said Nick Rau, an energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth. “These new [kite] technologies allow us to go further offshore and avoid other problems. We have an abundance of renewable energy and there is a lot of visionary technologies coming along so, in the future, the sky’s the limit.”