Kite power generation is growing, and now Norwegian developer Kitemill AS is eyeing a site at an airport.
The company has submitted a license application for a pilot wind energy project at Lista Airport in the Farsund Municipality. The plan is to deploy 15 kite units between 490 and 1,640 feet high.
The location appears ideal, except it is close to a nature reserve and inside a bird migration corridor.
How will operators apply safety regulators’ strict operational limits?
How wind infrastructure and protected reserves meet
The proposal for the Norwegian Airborne Wind Energy Pilot (NAWEP) involves a 0.58-square-mile plot inside the airport’s existing industrial zone.
Conventional wind turbines need to stand on huge concrete foundations and require many miles of access roads. This tethered kite array, however, will have a ground footprint of only 0.12 acres.
They are anchored by steel-frame ground stations. These house the winches, responsible for reeling out the cables connecting the high-efficiency winged units.
The mechanism behind the power generation is the continuous cycles of ascent and descent. When operating at full scale, the system will have a capacity of 1.2 megawatts. Around 4.2 gigawatt-hours per year will be fed into the local power grid.
But there are conservation concerns. The installation site is just 0.87 miles away from the Nesheimsvatnet nature reserve and 1,080 feet from Slevdalsvannet, which is a main habitat for protected wetland birds needing a stopover.
There are many standard impact models for fixed wind turbine towers. But these cannot be applied to dynamic airfoil structures that operate at such altitudes.
A six-year precautionary rollout protocol
Kitemill has come up with a phased rollout strategy to satisfy the environmental laws. The expected time frame will be six years from 2026 to 2031. In the beginning, flight testing will be limited to three research units that will only be allowed to operate during the day.
The baseline collision risk rate needs to be determined before crews will be permitted to install additional hardware on the ground.
In the next phase in 2027, three production stations will be installed but under observational monitoring.
If all environmental conditions are met, the other 12 stations will go up in 2028 before connecting to the grid.
The automated control technology behind the kite operation involves tracking the tension in the tether, wind speed, and spatial positioning. This all takes place within a designated airspace hazard zone.
If flight anomalies or equipment failures are picked up, the automated sensors will instruct safety software to instigate a return-to-home action.
By stretching out the installation process over years, field ornithologists have time to measure real-world conditions. It is fundamental to understand how avian life interacts with this type of energy infrastructure.
Safety systems kick in during peak migration
Engineers have come up with a mode that activates during the busiest migration periods and involves a shutdown seeing all 15 kites reeled in down to their bases.
When migration is at a peak in spring and fall, generation has to be curtailed. This is set out in the environmental impact assessment. The airspace is close to the coast, and the corridor will see thousands of birds moving through.
Flight controls behind the airfoils are automated. The mechanism is meant to remove visual displacement factors, and the risk of birds colliding with the tethers is minimized because they will have been reeled in.
Bird surveillance in real time
Avian mitigation relies on scheduled operational shutdowns during peak spring and fall migration windows, targeted condition-based pauses near Slevdalsvannet, continuous monitoring, and adaptive management, as reported in the Kitemill 2026 Executive Summary.
The Lista pilot project has found a smart way to limit permanent hazards from the equation, and now airborne systems can operate under conditions of environmental sensitivity. This is a practical framework that other kite operators can follow for future kite power projects as the sector grows.
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