Spacing between flying units stems from the need to avoid collisions and the risk of entanglement in flight, as well as to mitigate the wake effect, as with wind turbines, although AWE (even kite-reeling) is advantaged by a larger and higher wind front.
Power available of 4/27 and the time of reel-in phase (= the time of power reel-out phase, leading to an average power divided by approximately 2, to be optimistic) are other parameters.
A wind turbine will occupy the area corresponding to the base of the tower plus an access perimeter, so much less than one hectare. Secondary use (farming, fishing) is easy and without risk between the wind turbines within a wind farm.
Things are very different within an AWES farm where units and tethers are flying in all wind directions, producing very high traction force, preventing an easy and safe secondary use on a perimeter where the tether length is the radius, in addition to the space of ground stations.
Therefore, there is very little chance that AWES farms compete with traditional tower wind farms.
For less intensive agricultural land the risks are less than autonomous cars.
E.G. pastures, forests, unpopulated mountain tops unfeasible for heavy road transport are good candidates. Also orchards and large scale crops require only a handful of working passes in a year, and not the entire space at the same time. Agricultural heavy machinery already started to be robotized or remotely operated and can broadcast their position to have the nearby kite(s) adopt a safer flight pattern in those specific days (or hours) when work is needed within their range.
It is a matter of risk/insurance vs frequency of and technical capabilities to handle accidents - most likely and serious one being a line break.
*Land can be used for alternative activities while Kitepower is deployed. During operation untrained people are not allowed in the flight zone.
The flight zone moves according to the direction of the wind, which means that if a farmer wants to use the land used by the AWES, he must consult the weather hour by hour, which is not feasible.
This kite, measuring 40 to 60 m², has a rated power of 30 kW, with a traction force of 2.5 T. Now let us imagine a 5 MW kite farm (5 MW would be a low value for a tower wind turbine farm): the total traction force would be more than 400 T. An unexpected gust of wind carries all of this (tethers and kites) away, which will drag for dozens of kilometers, destroying everything in its path. “Autonomous cars” would be toys in comparison.
We could try putting AWES farms in desert areas (like the one we see in the tests in China), but then we would have to add the electricity transmission cable over long distances, in case everything was running continuously.
Moritz Diehl has a great study on the potential of AWES to improve energy density / km^2
Vertical Airborne Wind Energy Farms with High Power Density per
Ground Area based on Multi-Aircraft Systems
arXiv:2211.15813v1 [eess.SY] 28 Nov 2022
Jochem De Schutter1 , Jakob Harzer1 , Moritz Diehl1,2
The general plan of the M-AWES farm (which could be replaced by parasails covering the same circular areas called n) shown in Fig. 1 seems suitable although obvious.
In the page 2, it is indicated that Betz limit (16/27) is considered for each of the units. So the AWES mode cannot be reeling (yo-yo) mode, being limited to 4/27 and divided by approximately two due to the time and energy of the reel-in recovery phase, i.e., eight times less. And yet there is a clear reference to reel-in and reel-out phases (for example on page 3)…
Thus the density is divided by about eight.
The angle of elevation of 40° in Fig. 1 looks possible although optimistic.
And above all, the tether lengths are not taken into account for the calculation of the density when they should (by taking account of all wind directions), due to safety issues in secondary use (farming or fishing), not to mention the risks of kites and their tethers being dragged for tens of kilometers in the event of breakages.
In the end the AWES-farm density is a tiny fraction of what is suggested.