System Design and Scaling Trends in Airborne Wind Energy

Airborne wind energy (AWE) is an emerging technology that differs in operating principles from horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWTs). It uses tethered flying devices to harness higher-altitude wind resources. The primary motivation for AWE development lies in its potential to deliver similar energy output at lower costs and reduced carbon emissions compared to wind turbines of equivalent power ratings. AWE is in its early development stage, with commercial prototypes reaching power outputs of up to several hundred kilowatts. At this early stage of technology development, the AWE industry can significantly benefit from a systems-level understanding of the technology. To this end, the work reported here developed a multi-disciplinary design, analysis and optimisation (MDAO) tool for the conceptual system design of an AWE device and applied it to identify key design drivers, trade-offs and the scaling potential of a chosen AWE concept.

The MDAO tool is a framework that integrates models, including wind resources, power production, energy production and costs. As part of this research, new models were developed to enable the framework’s functionality. This study focused on the fixed-wing ground-generation (GG) concept of AWE. Still, the proposed methodology can be applied to any AWE concept depending on the availability of individual models tailored to the particular concept. In most markets, performance is measured using a metric known as the levelised cost of energy (LCoE). This metric relates the system's total costs to the energy it can produce over its lifetime. This metric is used here as the objective for system design, evaluating trade-offs and scaling analysis.