In 2024, engineers lowered a 28-ton underwater kite off the Faroe Islands; it generated up to 1.2MW by flying figure-eights faster than the tide

In 2024, engineers lowered a 28-ton underwater kite off the Faroe Islands, and it began generating up to 1.2 megawatts of electricity by flying figure-eight loops through the tide at speeds faster than the tide itself. The machine is named Dragon 12 and made by the Swedish company Minesto. On February 9, 2024, it generated its first electricity for the Faroese national grid. According to Minesto, the kite is 12 meters wide, weighs 28 tons, and flies a figure-eight path while tethered to the seabed and steered by the tidal current passing under it. It uses no fuel, and no fixed turbine on the seabed waits for the tide to pass to turn it. If thinking about tidal power usually means a big stationary turbine stuck on the seabed, this one doesn't work like that, and it's worth knowing why.

The trick that lets a machine outrun the water pushing it

The system works on a different principle than a conventional turbine. Dragon 12 does not wait in the tidal flow, letting the current twist it like a propeller. It flies across the flow in a repeating figure-eight, like a stunt kite in a steady wind. This sideways, looping motion allows the wing to slice through the water much faster than the current that drives it. Research funded by the Department of Energy and carried out with North Carolina State University explains the same process: flying across the flow, not directly into it, allows the kite to build speed that the current alone could not provide. The turbine's power output increases considerably because power rises dramatically with speed; even a small increase in relative speed creates a large increase in the electricity produced. This is the process that caused Dragon 12 to jump from Minesto's previous 100-kilowatt prototype to a full 1.2 megawatts, a twelvefold increase which it documented directly on its own site.

A massive US energy resource still sitting untapped

Tidal power has always had one problem in American waters: most U.S. coastlines have currents that aren't strong enough to make a heavy, fixed turbine on the seafloor a good investment. A kite that creates its own effective speed gets around that problem. That matters because the United States has barely tapped a resource that lies just offshore. The technically recoverable marine energy potential in U.S. waters, in the form of waves, tides, and river currents, equals roughly 57 percent of the country's total electricity generation in 2019. This figure covers all forms of marine energy combined, not tidal power alone. The same report states that exploiting just one-tenth of that technical potential would provide about 5.7 percent of current U.S. electricity generation. Coastal communities in Alaska, tidal channels in Maine, and stretches of the Pacific Northwest all lie within reach of currents that are steady if not fast. Technology that taps a small current and turns it into something useful would be precisely the kind of tool needed to make those places viable without building a dam or laying a large structure on the seafloor.

What has to happen before this reaches American shores

Dragon 12 is not yet a power station serving a city. It is a single unit feeding a small national grid on a remote island chain. Minesto's own project page outlines plans to build out 200 megawatts of tidal arrays around the Faroe Islands using multiple kites of this design working in sequence. Scaling a similar system up in US waters would likely require years of permitting, environmental review near marine habitats, and evidence that the tether and control systems can hold up through storms and years of continuous cycling.

The Department of Energy has continued funding kite research at North Carolina State University, indicating that similar systems are also under study in the United States. Still, the basic proof now exists in open water rather than a lab tank. A machine can fly underwater fast enough to outrun the very current pushing it, and turn that motion into electricity a national grid actually uses. For a country with thousands of miles of coastline and tidal currents that remain largely unharnessed, this is a resource that merits closer study.