The industrial and market choices behind KiteX’s designs are novel (to summarize, a large swept area for the most common wind conditions) and deserve further investigation. Maybe they could potentially also be applied to AWE.
Here is perhaps one of the keys to this innovation:
Yeah, I think these are valid points. A large, lightweight design can drop lot of weight if:
it caps its production at (e.g.) 7m/s yet survives in strong storms.
can drop the costs proportionately with weight
keeps a long life
So overall a larger capacity factor and/or lots of more productive sites.
Regarding applying these ideas to flying turbines - the weight table is pretty straightforward - nacelle + rotor = ~200kg. Half maybe with power transfer to ground via rope & pulleys
Now how much of a kite is needed to lift that in light winds (since these was it designed for)?