Electrically powered transport aircraft promise to be one answer to the need of energy efficient configurations. Independent of the source of electricity (turbo-electric/fuel cell/battery hybrid), at industry relevant transport capacity the integration of high power electric motors is both an opportunity and challenge for the air frame designer. Distributing multiple drive units along the wing reduces the power per propulsor to moderate levels. Such distributed propulsion (DP) concepts benefit from increased total disc area on the propulsion side and higher maximum lift of the wing. The benefits are opposed by the propeller-wing interaction leading to distorted lift distributions and additional drag from nacelles and slipstream velocity. Taking these parameters into account, a system efficiency of a periodic wing section with distributed propulsion is evaluated with RANS in this paper. The findings are backed up with wind tunnel data, verifying the RANS + actuator disc approach at high lift. On system level, the additional wing drag due to DP dominates the DP efficiency, while the propulsive efficiency alone is only slightly increased. Therefore, in this paper we strive to reduce the drag of the DP wing section at a constant thrust and lift requirement. While the viscous drag in the slipstream velocity can only be slightly reduced by a changing the radial blade loading of the propeller, the induced drag due to spanwise lift variation in the propeller wake is partially compensated for by deferentially changing the flap angle of the wing. The potential of such a spanwise varying DP wing section is evaluated in the final paper.