Here is a global wind power tracker: Tracker Map - Global Energy Monitor There’s lots of places onshore that don’t have much wind power installed, at least partly due to a lack of wind, but where there should be wind at higher altitudes, unreachable by conventional wind.
Because the Pyramid has both powered take off and a tower it can be deployed in more places than systems that don’t have that, conventional wind needs wind close to the ground to generate electricity and SkySails needs wind close to the ground for launch for example, so going offshore benefits the Pyramid less but does make it more expensive. You could instead put it in a forest, without cutting down the surrounding trees.
Because the danger zone is small and relatively static (the shaft), you can probably also sooner put units closer together since the shaft will be relatively static in the sky, so a wind farm, onshore, sooner starts making some sense.
Generally I think AWE makes less sense to put offshore as it is less affected by the planetary boundary layer and needs more maintenance with the more unproven and inherently more fault-prone designs. What are reasons to go offshore for AWE? The only reason I can think of is perhaps risk of crashing, but you can just prohibit entry to the wind farm until the risk of that becomes negligible, or land when you see movement. If you do crash, it’s also better to do that onshore where you can quickly replace the kites and so on and maybe recover parts.
And then it likely will take decades until your system is ready to bid on offshore projects. You can’t make that your focus. I don’t know how Makani or Ampyx, or their investors, thought that was a good idea. Or maybe it was a good idea but interest rates went up. Hindsight is 20/20, but it’s not like the lesson wasn’t learned previously: Slow Chat III - #138 by Windy_Skies