The World in 2030

198 The World in 2030
noisier and more efficient) without upsetting anyone.
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And, a couple of years after Monbiot’s important book was
published, The Economist newspaper explored an idea put
forward by the ISET Institute 376 at the University of Kassel,
in Germany, to create a European-wide DC power grid to
allow a free exchange of electricity across Europe. In an
article entitled ‘Where the Wind Blows’ the Economist’s
correspondent pointed out that although wind turbine
generation is an erratic source of power, if a distribution grid
were sufficiently large, power could be transferred across
Europe from areas where the wind is blowing to areas that
are becalmed. The article continued:
A group of Norwegian companies have already started
building high-voltage DC lines between Scandinavia,
the Netherlands and Germany, though these
are intended as much to sell the country’s power as to
accumulate other people’s. And Airtricity – an Irish
wind-power company – plans even more of them. It
proposes what it calls a Supergrid. This would link
offshore wind farms in the Atlantic ocean and the
Irish, North and Baltic seas with customers throughout
northern Europe.
Airtricity reckons that the first stage of this project, a
2,000 turbine-strong farm in the North Sea, would cost
about €2 billion ($2.7 billion). That farm would generate
10 gigawatts. An equivalent amount of coal-fired
capacity would cost around $2.3 billion so, adding in
the environmental benefits, the project seems worth