Don Montague has always known there’s power in the wind. For much of the 1980s, he traveled the world, winning windsurfing World Cup races and thinking up new sail designs. In the 1990s, he turned his attention upward, designing kites to haul surfers across the water at speeds of 40 miles per hour and faster. His experiments helped pioneer the now wildly popular sport of kiteboarding.
In 2006, Montague was well into his latest project, trying to break the trans-Atlantic crossing record using a boat pulled by a giant kite, when his friends, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (avid kiteboarders both), proposed a different direction. “They said, ‘Hey, Don, we’re working on all these other projects to help save the world—maybe you should focus more on producing electricity than trying to pull boats,’ ” Montague explained over the phone.
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Montague had been trying to get funding from his usual extreme-sport sponsors—Red Bull and sports companies. But now he had a new option, Google, which supplied him with $10 million. The federal government’s Advanced Research Project Agency chipped in another $3 million. Montague approached two kiteboarding scientists, Saul Griffith and Corwin Hardham, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and founded Makani Power, based in Alameda, Calif. Continue reading “How Kitesurfing Sparked a Green Energy Revolution”