Tom Raftery asks an interesting question: "What if electricity were like the Internet?"
Beyond the normal realm of politics, I'd expect that one of the obstacles to this ideas is transmission loss. However, even today, it is economically feasible to have transmission systems exceed a distance of 4,000 km and with high temperature superconducting materials (such as copper oxide materials or the recently discovered iron based superconductors) this could be almost lossless.
Considering the fluctuation in renewable energy supply and CO2 production being a worldwide issue, I'm surprised that we don't hear more about the ideas of a worldwide energy grid.
According to wikipedia, "the concept of an interconnected global grid linked to renewable resources was first suggested by Buckminster Fuller" in the 1970s.
There are even organisations such as the Global Energy Network Institute (GENI) who apparently have been working on the "viability of the interconnection of electric power networks between nations".
This subject deserves a higher profile.
