> At first it doesn'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.

Agreed, durability is the first hurdle and that's a tough one for any new tech.

> There's a decent chance they won't and if so, how tightly you can pack them is 100% irrelevant.

Yes.

> Traditional windmills are fairly expensive per watt and they can only be financed when they'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.

Assuming all else being equal, and anything that's not equal will probably affect that 10%.

> Further, that's before you start factoring in the cost of actually moving the power from where the windmill generates power to where people use power.

Agreed. So the cost of infrastructure needs to be added to the base cost as well and will be a factor in determining the economy of a particular site/technology.

> I don't know what it's like in Europe for sure (though from what I can tell there are problems),

Yes, but fortunately Europe is a bit more dense so the problems are there but not as extreme as in other parts of the world.

> But I can tell you that it's a nightmare here in the US.

I know. I toured a lot of wind parks in '05 and transmission was a huge problem.

> 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're going to have a bad time.

Typically the costs of the transmission lines are borne by another party than the one putting up the capital for the wind-park but there is close collaboration between the two to make things work out. Also, once a park comes online in a certain spot the transmission lines usually have enough spare capacity once installed that other sites become possibles from an economy perspective so a follow-on investment in other parks in more or less the same location usually happens.

> 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 "free" but eventually execution got cheap and latency got expensive. Is it a perfect analogy? No. But there's some wisdom hidden, perhaps.

It all depends on practical deployment, environmental issues (they'll be screamers with those small props), maintenance required, longevity and so on.

As to your edit: yes, that's possible but they should make that very clear as it is the claim is just about meaningless. Someone else in this thread interprets it as related to the ability to function in a wider range of wind and so able to extract more power from a given site. But that's not very convincing if they do because you'd need to deploy the unit side-by-side with a conventional machine and measure in practice including all downtime over a longer period of time whether or not this is the case.

And with the spacing being what it is this probably won't work out favorably for Makani. Still, it's a super interesting project.