I love how HN news stories sometimes get near-top comments within hours from people who have spent years pushing the envelope on them!  Maybe someone from Makani can comment too.<p>The great thing about kites, to me, is that the &quot;tower&quot; — the great majority of the material in a normal windmill — is reduced to the minimum: just the material necessary to resist the tensile force that&#x27;s driving the generator, with negligible sideloading.  And that should make it feasible to harness wind power at kilometers of altitude.  (250 meters is just the start!)<p>You are surely correct that wearout and reliability curves on these things are going to be big unknowns until we have a few thousand kite-years of experience.