So I guess I would respectfully disagree with a lot of what you say based on underlying assumptions.  At first it doesn&#x27;t matter how land efficient or inefficient these things are; they have to actually really for reals work and prove that they have durability and whatnot.  There&#x27;s a decent chance they won&#x27;t and if so, how tightly you can pack them is 100% irrelevant.<p>&gt; Windmills are sited such that they are rarely idle, it happens but that&#x27;s money being lost and a very large amount of the pre-work in siting a wind power park is to make sure that idle time is as low as possible. Yes, it is nice they&#x27;re stowed when not in use but that&#x27;s a situation you want to avoid.<p>Well, sort-of.  Traditional windmills are fairly expensive per watt and they can only be financed when they&#x27;re turning all the time.  But if your kite system only cost 10% of a traditional windmill then it only has to turn 10% as much as a regular windmill.  Further, that&#x27;s <i>before</i> you start factoring in the cost of actually moving the power from where the windmill <i>generates power</i> to where people <i>use power</i>.  I don&#x27;t know what it&#x27;s like in Europe for sure (though from what I can tell there are problems), but I can tell you that it&#x27;s a nightmare here in the US.  Dollars per watt generated are important, but ultimately what governs feasibility is dollars per watt delivered.  If you have to spend $1b to put up new transmission lines to your $200mm ideally located, perfectly productive wind park, you&#x27;re going to have a bad time.<p>If these kites are much, much cheaper than everything else you could end up seeing a sort of paradigm shift like computing saw; at first instruction execution was expensive and latency was &quot;free&quot; but eventually execution got cheap and latency got expensive.  Is it a perfect analogy?  No.  But there&#x27;s some wisdom hidden, perhaps.<p>EDIT: I read your longer write-up on the issue and perhaps they&#x27;re not talking about power per meter of rotor, but power per dollar.  Metrics matter.