The Space Fountain is an eternal machinegun battery aimed up. The bullets are magnetic iron, nickel, and/or cobalt. Their target are evenly-spaced holes around a disc. The disc has its own magnet, to steer those bullets sideways and to steal their kinetic energy. The bullets fall back down... into the fountain. Fountain-guns redirect the bullets back up. (I assume the guns to be rifled, to spin the bullets.)
Over Venus, there's some wind-shear (tho' not Coriolis, as here). But the wind is unlikely to divert a speeding, spinning bullet. Also gravity isn't so high.
To handle the shear at the disc's altitude I'd fire the bullets at a bit of an angle. Now the wind isn't a problem for the disc; it becomes the disc's energy source, just like down on the surface. The surface will need to collect those falling bullets and roll them back into place though. This is what we'd do over Maxwell's site; upwind of that kite.
If the disc is floating over cloud-level, it soaks up to 2620 Wm-2 of insolation, also. Solar-panels can nab that. Some fountains at Aphrodite Terra aim straight up. Those stations serve the exosphere - that is, space.
3/13 MEN... DE...: I don't trust the wind to be consistent at Maxwell latitude. It's perilously close to the Vortex. Let's NOT do that.
11/26/21 THIS CORROSION: I expect the wind constant-enough at Maxwell to get maybe 20 km up. I further expect some katabasis at Aphrodite where, at the equator, the wind is near-fully predictable. I don't see superconductors anywhere but with this much free energy, who needs 'em. Our first constraint is that the top of the tower not touch the clouds.
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