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Lattice, lattices, latticeworks in AWECS
airborne lattice
"Airborne lattice-work based on classic kiting seems to me to be the fundamental early enabler of dense AWE arrays. Fancy kiteplanes will not easily crash if held aloft in a lattice. Such latticework can be based overhead in common valleys & evolve in any direction to host any harvesting element. KiteLab's biz plan is to use the crash pattern of the "leaders" to attract attention and investment to preventative concepts."  Dave Santos Nov. 9, 2010

Take a 2 MW single-tether kiteplane (like Joby's model) operating under a 2000 ft ceiling. To keep safely clear of neighbors it occupies a circular plot near a mile across. Presume a 3x3 array of nine kiteplanes for 18 MW from a 3 mile square kitefarm. The same land developed with conventional 5 MW HAWTs, spaced normally, could develop greater than 100 MW, presuming that better wind capacity-factor aloft roughly offsets the lowered system availability of complex delicate aircraft. Conventional HAWTs win overwhelmingly in raw land efficiency without even touching the upper-wind. However, the same land and airspace that 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 and 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.
  Dave Santos, Nov. 10, 2010