Wind-fuelled ’supergrid’ offers clean power to Europe

An audacious proposal to build a 5,000-mile electricity supergrid, stretching from Siberia to Morocco and Egypt to Iceland, would slash Europe’s CO2 emissions by a quarter, scientists say.

The scheme would make the use of renewable energy, particularly wind power, so reliable and cheap that it would replace fossil fuels on an unprecedented scale, serving 1.1 billion people in 50 countries. Europe’s 1.25bn tons of annual CO2 output from electricity generation would be wiped out. High-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines, up to 100 times as long as the alternating current (AC) cables carried by the National Grid’s pylons, would form the system’s main arteries. While AC lines are the international standard, they leak energy. HVDC lines are three times as efficient, making them cost effective over distances above 50 miles.


Building the supergrid would require an investment of