Big turbines are big because of one simple thing: efficiency. It takes a lot less in terms of materials and space to make a single 8 MW turbine than it takes to generate the same amount of power with a large number of smaller ones.<p>Yes, if they go down you lose a large amount of capacity in one go, but that does not weigh against the cost of a large number of smaller turbines that will go down much more frequently with smaller losses (they still need to be repaired). Though the cost to repair them will likely be lower per instance the people doing the service still have to be called out.<p>I love this google project and I&#x27;m really curious what will come out but what with wind being my life-long side interest and having seen a large number of fantastic designs come with a hurricane of fanfare and go again without a breeze I&#x27;m not going to bet on this until there is much more hard data to compare to &#x27;conventional&#x27; systems.<p>Three blade conventional machines are anything but, they&#x27;re engineering marvels with a ton of materials science behind them, it took nearly 40 years to go from the 10 KW prototypes at Petten (in NH, NL), to the giants you see today. That&#x27;s a lot of R&amp;D invested over a very long period of time.<p>Now these kites can leverage some of that knowledge and they no longer have to validate the concept of windpower for regular consumption, that trail has already been blazed so they should have an easier time of it.<p>Here&#x27;s to hoping that it works, and that it won&#x27;t end up next to &#x27;windtree&#x27; or the &#x27;windbelt&#x27; or a hundred other revolutionary wind technologies that ended up being stillborn.