Most kites need three things: wind, a string, and a patch of open sky. A Swedish company called Minesto has built one that does without all three. Theirs has a steel tether instead of a string, it “flies” in moving water instead of air, it weighs 28 tons, and for the last 10 months one of them has been bolted to the floor of a sound in the Faroe Islands, swooping in figure eights 50 meters down and feeding the local grid.<\/p>\n
That megawatt-scale machine, the Dragon 12, came back to the surface in March for its scheduled checkup. And on March 17 Minesto put its smaller 100-kilowatt sibling, the Dragon 4, back into grid production as the first piece of a microgrid project part-funded by the Swedish Energy Agency. So the Faroes now have a working tidal kite pushing power into the grid and a megawatt one drying out on a quay, which is a stranger sentence than the renewable-energy business usually gets to write.<\/p>\n
Tidal energy has a basic problem that has nothing to do with the tide. The water in a strong current carries a lot of energy, but it moves slowly, and a turbine sitting still in slow water captures very little of it. The usual fix is to build something enormous and bolt it to the seabed, which is heavy, expensive, and a nightmare to install and service. Minesto’s answer is to stop sitting still.<\/p>\n
Anchor a wing to the seabed with a tether, let the tide push on it, and steer it so it carves a figure eight across the current. Because the kite travels several times faster than the water it sits in, a relatively small wing sweeps a large volume of flow, and the company says that is what lets a 12-meter device punch well above its size. The Dragon 12 is rated at 1.2 megawatts. According to Minesto’s Faroe Islands roadmap<\/a>, it is a straight ten-times scale-up of the 100-kilowatt Dragon 4: same idea, bigger wing, anchored at 50 meters in a constricted channel called Vestmannasund where the tide rips through hard enough to make the math work.<\/p>\n It is, mechanically, closer to an underwater stunt kite than to anything you would recognize as a power plant. There is no tower, no foundation the size of an apartment block, no spinning blade the length of a soccer field. There is a wing, a control system, a turbine on the back, and a cable. That low weight is the whole pitch, because weight is most of what makes marine energy expensive to build and to move around.<\/p>\n Here is the part most company updates would bury, and Minesto, to its credit, did not. The Dragon 12 had been grid-connected for nine months since May 2025 when it went into “park-mode” over the winter, parked in place as a precaution because its preventive maintenance intervals had been exceeded. The reason was not the kite. It was the boat. The local marine contractor that services the machine had been forced into unplanned work on its own vessel, which left Minesto without a way to pull the Dragon up on schedule.<\/p>\n The company decided not to mobilize a large vessel from abroad, on the grounds that the kite was sitting there in stable condition and a foreign boat would cost more than the situation was worth. It waited for the local vessel to come back, then recovered the Dragon 12 in March after roughly 10 months in the water. Minesto’s early inspection found the machine in the condition it expected, with the wear and tear you would predict from a device that spent the better part of a year in open ocean and ran past its service window. In its 2025 year-end report, the company said the megawatt machine had “proved robustness and stability beyond commercial service intervals.”<\/p>\n That episode is the whole Minesto bet in miniature. The pitch is that you can install and recover these kites with small, cheap, local work boats and local crews instead of the giant specialized vessels that make conventional offshore energy so expensive. When it works, it is a real cost advantage. When the one local boat you rely on is in the shop, it is also the reason a perfectly healthy megawatt power plant can sit idle in a fjord until spring. Cost advantage and logistical weak point are the same design choice, and the Faroes just spent a winter demonstrating both halves of it.<\/p>\n While the megawatt Dragon was waiting on a boat, its little brother was getting ready to go back to work. Minesto said in late February that it had serviced and re-rated the Dragon 4, including a power take-off upgrade the company expects to push the unit from 100 to 185 kilowatts. On March 17, in Minesto’s own project update<\/a>, the company said the 100-kilowatt Dragon 4 was installed and producing electricity to the Faroese grid.<\/p>\n That installation is the first physical step of a microgrid project, internally called ETRIC, that is part-funded by the Swedish Energy Agency and run with the Faroese national utility SEV. The idea is to pair tidal kites with onshore and seabed upgrades and battery storage into a self-contained grid that can keep a small, isolated community powered. Minesto has said it formed a consortium to build and demonstrate one, with an initial joint investment of 56 million Swedish kronor (around $6 million) in a setup the company describes as market-ready. SEV, for its part, already has a power purchase agreement to buy the electricity Minesto’s kites generate, which is the kind of detail that separates a demonstration from a science fair.<\/p>\n This matters more for a place like the Faroes than the small numbers suggest. A remote island grid cannot import power from a neighbor when the weather turns, so it needs sources it can count on. Tides are about as countable as it gets. They run on the moon’s schedule, not the forecast, which is the same reason a swarm of small machines is starting to look interesting in other corners of the map, from Germany’s run of river-current turbines in the Rhine<\/a> to the big tidal-stream schemes lining up in British waters.<\/p>\n One kite feeding power and one kite on a quay is not, on its own, an energy transition. The point of the Faroes is that it is supposed to be a template. Minesto’s roadmap calls for 200 megawatts of tidal capacity built out in stages across seven sites, anchored by the existing Vestmannasund installation and named locations including Hestfjord, Leirviksfjord, Skopunarfjord and Svinoyarfjord, with two more still unconfirmed. At full build, the company says that array would supply 40 percent of the islands’ growing electricity demand. The Faroes have set a national goal of running entirely on renewable power, including transport and heating, by 2030, and this is meant to be a large chunk of how they get there. The whole effort is tracked publicly by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Tethys database<\/a>, which is a reasonable sign it is being taken seriously outside Minesto’s own press releases.<\/p>\n The next real step is the Hestfjord Dragon Farm, what Minesto calls a first-of-a-kind tidal kite array: six Dragon 12 machines for 10 megawatts in the first phase, all flying figure eights in formation. The investment case behind it is not just the company’s say-so. The Norwegian classification society DNV, which certifies and reviews energy and maritime technology for a living, completed an independent technical review of the Dragon-class system in early 2025, looked at energy conversion, production volumes and installation procedures, and concluded the technology was ready enough to support that 10-megawatt array. DNV also handed over a list of risks and recommendations, which Minesto says it folded into its plans. That same predictable-physics argument is what is driving the large tidal-stream projects consented in Wales<\/a> and the floating tidal turbine Canada just cleared for the Bay of Fundy<\/a>, all of them betting that power you can schedule is worth paying a premium for.<\/p>\n None of that is a knock on the hardware. The kite flew for 10 months and came up in one piece, which is more than a lot of marine-energy gear can claim, and the figure-eight trick demonstrably works in a real current feeding a real grid. The open question is the boring one. Whether a model built on local work boats and small crews can keep six of these machines, and then dozens, in the water through a North Atlantic winter without one sitting dark because the only available vessel is in for repairs. The Faroes, a nation of about 54,000 people, are about to find out, one figure eight at a time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most kites need three things: wind, a string, and a patch of open sky. A Swedish company called Minesto has … <\/p>\nThen the local service boat broke down<\/h2>\n
The 100 kW kite that just went live<\/h2>\n
The plan is 200 megawatts and 40 percent of the country<\/h2>\n