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The Atlantic Wind Connection project is still at an early stage, and no one knows if Google and its co-investors can pull it off

While grid difficulties are not unique to renewable energy, the sector has the most to gain from improvements because wind and solar depend on the weather and thus need to be able to send their extra energy across large distances as flexibly as possible to balance out supply fluctuations, experts say.

Tres Amigas is trying to connect the western, eastern and Texas power grids -- an idea the federal government proposed but failed to execute in the 1950s -- with a $1 billion plus project that could ultimately send 30 gigawatts zooming across the country. Because the three grids don't quite operate on the same frequency, Tres Amigas would use novel technology to synchronize the electricity: superconducting high-voltage direct current cables and new computer programs. Power would first need to be converted from AC to DC, then whipped around the superstation on the superconducting cables and finally be converted back to AC to be shipped off to another grid

Obama administration already supports incentives to encourage drivers to buy electric cars, and it has devoted $2.4 billion in stimulus money to the development of a domestic electric-car industry.

existing $7,500 tax credit

If we gut domestic clean-energy research, scientists in China or Germany or Japan will finish this work. But it would be far better to stick with the program we’ve begun — financing research into better batteries while deploying vehicles that replace gasoline with electricity as much as possible — and prove that when it comes to energy, America can, in fact, learn from its mistakes.