Don Montague is leading an innovative enterprise to collect wind energy with high-tech kites. Google money is backing him.
"One day in 1993, while sitting on a beach in Maui, Don Montague watched as a friend strapped on a pair of water skis, harnessed himself to a kite, and tried to surf. It didn’t work, but Montague was intrigued. He was thirty at the time, and had established himself as one of the nation’s best windsurfers, winning World Cup races throughout the nineteen-eighties. As the sport began to boom, Montague also became one of its principal technicians, designing sails used by leading professional racers and by tens of thousands of amateurs. Between prize money and profits from sails that he had manufactured in China, he was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. "
Michael Specter reports for the New Yorker May 20, 2013.
SEE ALSO:
"Google Kite? Tech Giant Buys 'flying Windmill' Firm Makani" (Christian Science Monitor)
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