You are right to be skeptical. The torus or any other shroud has the effect of concentrating the wind on the turbine. You shouldn’t expect anything else from a vertical torus, especially not that it flies like a kite.
In the complete sketches I therefore added the kite: in all it is a variation of the FlygenKite. This would make it possible to rely less on helium.
That said, we can imagine a tethered torus inflated with helium carrying a turbine inside if the drag of the turbine and that of the torus (therefore the force of the wind) remains limited.
But lift generating and power turbine generating through the shroud can be incompatible. Indeed the required angle of attack to generate lift could mitigate the wind area on the shrouded turbine if it is tilted. So I think the only lift is that of aerostatic lift with helium. Or so is a point to check.
This seems likely. Concerning Altaeros and other shrouded BAT, we do not have all the data (in particular the wind speed, the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the shroud, the angle of attack…).
Concerning the torus-shaped balloon (tire) as a shroud, by my approximate experiments, if the turbine power is 2x, the total drag is about 3-6x: for some AWE applications (crosswind flight), it would be too much; for a static flight under a kite, it would perhaps be a possibility, the torus being light compared to the turbine when scaling.