Interesting @kitefreak’s post on 2010 about the topic Yahooist Teil der Yahoo Markenfamilie :
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Sparse v. Dense AWE Arrays
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dave santos santos137@yahoo.com
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airbornewindenergy@yahoogroups.com
Nov 9, 2010 at 4:33 PM
Take a 2mw single-tether kiteplane (like Joby’s model) operating under a 2000ft ceiling. To keep safely clear of neighbors it occupies a circular plot near a mile across. Presume a 3x3 array of nine kiteplanes for 18mw from a 3 mile square kitefarm. The same land developed with conventional 5mw HAWTs, spaced normally, could develop greater than 100mw, presuming that better wind capacity-factor aloft roughly offsets the lowered system availibility of complex delicate aircraft. Conventional HAWTs win overwhelmingly in raw land efficiency without even touching the upper-wind. However, the same land & airspace the nine kiteplanes sparsely occupy can be densely packed with airborne turbines or wingmills, in string latticework based on classic kite methods, for over a rated gigawatt. AWE arrays of cross-linked semi-captive elements seem to have a fantastic advantage in space-efficiency, not just safety & control, over single-tether designs.
I used crude geometric methods to estimate these figures, so it will be fun to see how well someone else’s calculations coincide. A suggestive guesstimate is that there is well over a gigawatt average in a tiny mid-lat crosswind patch of sky, just 100m across & 10km high.“/”