As far as I know, Makani has never successfully demonstrated net positive power generation. They have designed an incredibly complex tethered-helicopter-flying-

As far as I know, Makani has never successfully demonstrated net positive power generation. They have designed an incredibly complex tethered-helicopter-flying-wing, and that is an impressive technological achievement. But it's also a terrifying controls problem, and suffers from the same drawback as all the "flying car" startups: What goes up, must come down. Traditional wind turbines are a bit more predictable. The offshore flight test in August ended with a crash and the loss of the aircraft. I have to assume that no net power was generated during this test, or they would have mentioned it in the press release? https://medium.com/makani-blog/makanis-airborne-wind-power-system-takes-flight-offshore-907fd4c9af86 https://medium.com/makani-blog/makanis-airborne-wind-power-s... Makani's device is able to briefly generate power for a fraction of each crosswind loop it flies, but it has to draw power from the grid to push itself the rest of the way around the loop. This is neither useful as an energy source, nor cost competitive with a traditional wind turbine. For offshore applications, there are much simpler competing projects to put traditional wind turbines on spar buoys or semi-submersible platforms, e.g. http://www.principlepowerinc.com/en/windfloat http://www.principlepowerinc.com/en/windfloat