High altitude wind energy? Or to market now?

Hi Doug,
Keep your wind turbines. However, if you want to try an AWES, you need to have space, which may be possible in your region.

You have several possibilities: suspend a wind turbine (possibly of the Kiwee type but much larger) from an aerostat or a kite. In this case, you will need a huge kite or aerostat (filling it with helium is not free) even for only 10 kW of nominal power. A gust of wind and it all falls and shatters. Not a good solution.

Try a flexible crosswind kite: my recent experiences seem to show a not so huge gain (x3) compared to a tether-aligned kite, not justifying the complexity of constantly piloting the kite.

I leave out the rigid crosswind kites in reeling or flygen mode.

There are still reeling tether-aligned kites.

Try with a pair of second-hand parasails, each unit including a small parasail that stays open all the time to support the larger parasail during the reel-in recovery phase. Operating alternately, this should produce more or less continuous energy. Buy two old winches acting respective generators.

If you have space but not a lot, limit the height to 50-100 m for 50 m reeling phases.

You’ll soon get back to your wind turbines.

But if you have a lot of space to go to high altitudes, maybe you can sell the electricity produced.