It's an interesting idea (more wind higher up, without the expensive tall shaft required for a regular wind turbine), but how does it get relaunched when it falls to the ground? Wouldn't a balloon or regular kite be simpler and just as effective?
I'm guessing: the same way you'd launch a regular kite: by starting with it off the ground and slowly letting out the line. Possibly the propellors can be switched from generators to motors if it needs an extra boost.
A balloon would lose too much in drag. If they can actually solve the software problem to get these things up and flying autonomously, it'd be pretty darn effective.
But I do wonder what would happen if the tether did break. It says that there are no batteries on the device, so if the tether is gone, is there any means of providing a gentle landing other than gliding blindly?
I'd say they have something worked out, as this is one of the more obvious catastrophic modes of failure imaginable. Of course, the unexpected is more likely to do harm - possibly the tether turning into a giant 200m steel whip ready to sever anyone unfortunate to be within the vicinity...
That said, I wouldn't mind one - maybe just a couple of KW for a rural off-grid section...
Still, the fact that they've got it working once doesn't mean the problem is solved. You need it to work all the time, in all sorts of weather conditions, and automatically stow itself if conditions become unsafe. Failure means plowing into the ground, which is probably going to be expensive each time it happens.
I'm sure they'll never get the plow-into-the-ground rate down to zero, but there's gotta be a lot of work still to be done to get it as small as possible.
It may be that they haven't done any noise testing at this stage (and the IEC 61400-11 standard for wind turbine noise testing is really not applicable to the AWT configuration) but they would have been better off just saying something like "we'll get back to you on that" rather than setting up expectations that might turn out to be unrealistic.