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'Windmill': China tests world’s first megawatt-level airship to capture high winds
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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Edit: I was trying to get more information from other articles and got the S1000 (100kW) mixed up with the S1500 (1000kW)
~~They're trying to get it to100kW. That's like a pretty big generator but not a huge one. So this isn't a replacement for wind farms just yet. The picture is from a year ago~~. No mention of costs.
Would it be possible to use heat to get it to float, instead of helium? Heat it up with electricity.
Using hot air instead of helium would not work. The density of hot air is much higher than helium, so you would need a significantly larger airship to lift the same mass of payload (the useful bits). That and keeping the air hot would require constant energy input reducing the efficiency of the system dramatically. I'm pretty sure that system would be literally impossible to construct.
Hydrogen is simply the right lifting gas. Helium not abundant enough for sustainable scale. AFAIK, this model did use H2. Previous protototypes used helium.