Though I can sort-of see the point of those who do, since I find that power lines for example completely ruin otherwise unspoiled views on mountain-hikes.

The energy storage problem is already solved. Compressed air is low-tech, efficient, indefinitely scalable, and can drive existing power-plant turbines either alone, or burned with fuel, or solar-heated. An underground air tank may be cheaply insulated to retain heat, eliminating the major loss typical in portable compressed-air energy storage schemes.

It isn’t exactly solved; the systems for a commercial scale use salt caverns, not tanks, and have to cool the air to store it, and then reheat it after expanding it. The temperatures involved are too high to just store:
http://www.livescience.com/technology/080604-pf-caes.html

When Toronto’s single windmill was built along the shoreline at our Exhibition grounds, our young nephew, a toddler at the time, would yell with excitement in the car whenever he could see it blowing. In any tall building, it’s the first landmark he looks for, impressive considering the size of the CN Tower.

It may be generational to some extent, but I think windmills are beautiful. Around the same time the Toronto windmill was constructed, 4 large coal smokestacks along the shore were demolished. Many decried the destruction of the “4 sisters” as they were known.

As one family member quipped, the white whooshing windmill is a lot prettier than 4 sooty cigarette smokestacks.

Why are windmills considered picturesque in the Netherlands but eyesores everywhere else?

Well, modern windmills are considerably larger than the picturesque ones. In fact, the fact that the new ones ruin the view, and hardly anyone wants them in their back yard, is one of the main reasons to move them offshore. Just have to make sure to put them beyond the horizon.

Of course, moving the wind turbines out to sea increases building and maintenance costs. I guess that’s the price we’ll have to pay to not have them in our back yards.

Unfortunately, there are also those who are concerned about disturbing the sea life. It appears you can’t make everyone happy.

pjb: What “miles of hoses”? I’m sure the thousands of municipalities using low-pressure water pumps and piping in their drinking-water systems would be astonished to find that they are each unique in having little trouble maintaining them. Producing an ionized, atomized mist is easy to achieve ultrasonically, or simply by blowing compressed air through perforations under a thin water surface. (I.e. no nozzles.) The amount of water required is not large; its main purpose is to increase the air friction with the ions. The voltage applied to the water to ionize it makes it much easier to atomize, because the droplets repel one another.

We’re WIIMBYs (Want it in my back yard!)

Does not include the cost to refit the grid to high voltage DC because power losses over the distance travelled would make the current AC structure impractical.

Maybe you missed the commentary from almost every energy transport source that our grid is already beyond capacity, and the next upgrade needs to be DC because of it’s higher capacity and lower cost per KW (also HVDC using superconductors acts as storage as well as transport, providing load balancing across the network). I won’t give you specific citations – just Google DC power grid.

Glad to see that the rest of your comment has already been thoroughly debunked by other posters.

The sooner we move to no-moving-parts windmills, the better.

The original patent was issued in 1979…and development has been scandalously slow.

More often than not this is an indication of an infeasibility or impracticality of the invention than it is an indication of a sadly overlooked breakthrough. I don’t know much about ion windmills, so I can’t speak with much confidence, but it seems to me like it would be a very high-loss system. How do you figure on Gigawatts of energy from nets stretched across Chicago? What kind of coverage and efficiency are you assuming?
Also, I’m with Markk. Although definitely doable, this method is more maintenance-intensive than you are letting on (lots of pumps, miles of pipes/hoses, corrosion/mineralization/wear, god knows how many spray nozzles to maintain, no doubt more issues) and would certainly not scale up to unlimited size. Continuously atomizing tens of thousands (more? millions?) of gallons of water per minute would be no simple task.
That said, I think it’s an extremely clever idea and I’m interested to see if it ever takes off.