Hi Pierre: As logical as this “HES” concept sounds, without specifically analyzing it mathematically, my “shoot-from-the-hip” impression is this:
Such a system would cost more to build, maintain, and run, than the amount of benefit it could provide.
Similar to most every wannabe wind energy “advanced” (which actually MEANS “wannabe”, in almost every case) solution, there are “a million ways” to generate SOME amount of electric power from the wind, at SOME cost.
Take kite-reeling, for example: After maybe a $ billion spent, and the effort of thousands of well-intentioned people over 15 years, perhaps a few days of somewhat meager power output have been generated, amounting to probably less total energy than my tower-mounted Bergey 10 kW wind turbine generates every month (worth maybe $200 at best).
That probably comes out to over a million dollars per kiloWatt-hour. And no matter how many times Pierre repeats the supposed fact(?) of over 100 kW once being generated by one such system, on one single day, perhaps a decade ago, and maybe one other day, there does not seem to be any system in regular operation, to this day, right? So as great as AWE has sounded, it is, as of today, pretty-much nowhere, with pretty much no compelling results to show, only more hopeful and wishful statements of the possibility of future progress, right? And THAT is only concerning the actual topic of this frum.
If we go on to branch out to seemingly-similar ideas - airborne systems utilizing onboard atmospheric condensation to power hydroelectric systems, my spider-sense says such an idea is another such slow-motion trainwreck in the making, where sure, some “team” might be able to raise a few million dollars, hire 20 or so people, get in a few group-selfie photos to publish on the internet so the 20 or so hired kids can call their parents and direct them to the website, the parents can then call all their friends and everyone can bask in the resulting congratulatory global-warming-generated virtue-signaling orgasm, but just like an organism - woops I mean “orgasm” - with a prostitute, there will be no offspring generated from this montage of misdirected goodwill, only delays and disappointment, a few months or years of handwaving-and-happy-talk, and hopefully, some engineering experience for the innocent newbie kids who were initially excited to be included in the group-selfie photos.
I could point out, it also reminds me of the spectre of perhaps a decade ago, of one particular party bragging about getting a self-winding watch to actually (supposedly) wind itself while being randomly flung about by a kite. Yes, technically one could claim energy being generated, but the amount of energy obtained, compared to the effort required, was just not enough to be even slightly interesting, let alone profitable. 