One of the stories wind power sceptics love to tell is about how Germany invested so much in wind without considering how to get the power from remote sites to consumers. When the dust settled Germany had spent so much on power transmission infrastructure that it would have been cheaper to burn their abundant coal and plant trees to reduce GHGs.

This isn't a unique situation, it is common. Some entrepreneurs have made a proposal to address it.

Last month a Dublin-based wind-farm developer, Airtricity, and Swiss engineering giant ABB began promoting a bold solution to the continent's power grid bottlenecks: a European subsea supergrid running from Spain to the Baltic Sea, in which high-voltage DC power lines link national grids and deliver power from offshore wind farms. When the wind is blowing over a wind farm on the supergrid, the neighboring cables would carry its power where most needed. When the farms are still, the cables will serve a second role: opening up Europe's power markets to efficient energy trading.

The result would be a more integrated and thus more competitive European market, delivering power at lower prices. And it would enable Europe's grid to safely accommodate even more clean, but highly variable wind power. . .

By solving two problems at once -- interlinking grids and providing hookups for more offshore wind farms -- Veal thinks Airtricity has found a solution that's economically feasible. "It's something the market can do," he says.

Airtricity proposes to start by building a massive 20 billion euro ($23.8 billion) project in the North Sea. . .

solidifying the European grid is just a first step. His optimization studies show that the benefits of the supergrid multiply if one extends high-voltage DC lines beyond Europe to North Africa and the Middle East. By doing so, he says, one could ensure that there was always enough output from renewable sources, such as wind plants and solar panels, to power an area spanning 50 countries and 1.1 billion people.

This is exactly the opposite of what many now see as sensible power generation progress. John Atkinson points to an article by John Robb, Security: Power to the People, that investigates the implications of decentralized networks of monkey-wrenchers on ever more integrated systems such as the proposed European super-grid.

. . . terrorists have developed the ability to fight nation-states strategically--without weapons of mass destruction. This new method is called "systems disruption," a simple way of attacking the critical networks (electricity, oil, gas, water, communications, and transportation) that underpin modern life. Such disruptions are designed to erode the target state's legitimacy, to drive it to failure by keeping it from providing the services it must deliver in order to command the allegiance of its citizens.

It isn't just Islamic terrorists that need concern us since we have all manner of creeps and cranks among us already that have a long history of increasingly violent and disruptive acts against society. The solution isn't obvious - we need robust and resilient systems able to degrade without failing when localities are damaged due to intentional and unintentional events. The super-grid idea seems to be a non-starter unless there is some facet of the system that isn't apparent.