With a view to mass use, kite-reeling, including giant 5000 m² parachute (see the vast, completely desert landscape where the tests shown in the video are being carried out), parasails, power kites (see figure 15), have the significant advantage of having the generator on the ground, but have also big disadvantages.
- Their intermittent, phased operation can be detrimental to the lifespan of certain components (tethers, soft kites).
- Difficult automated control of takeoff and landing operations with soft kites.
- And above all, if we accept that the first two points are resolved in a sufficiently satisfactory manner: the requirement of huge land and space which is common to all AWES and results from safety requirements due to the very long tethers with very high tension and the risk of breakage, and also spacing between flying units, is greatly aggravated (4x) by the power available of 4/27 instead of 16/27 (Betz limit), the additional space use due to reel-out/in operations, and by the time (including kite deployment and retraction) and energy consumption of reel-in phase (2x being optimistic, see Mutiny tests). So, kite-reeling would take at least 8x the space for a power equivalent to that of some other AWES (rotary, wind turbine aloft), leading to at least 8x land use on the basis of the space of the ground stations plus the tether length as the radius of required land due to safety requirements.
While wind speed does increase with altitude, this does not compensate for the space used, i.e., the density per km² and per km³.
And I don’t see kite-reeling for an individual use, due to complex operation with the two phases.