NY-Times: “The windiest sites have not been built, because there is no way to move that electricity from there to the load centers,” "Without a clear way of recovering the costs and earning a profit, and with little leadership on the issue from the federal government, no company or organization has offered to fight the political battles necessary to get such a transmission backbone built." ...New York State has about 1,500 megawatts of wind capacity with a A large Wal-Mart drawing about one megawatt. An Energy Department plan to source 20 percent of the nation’s electricity from wind calls for a high-voltage backbone spanning the country that would be similar to 2,100 miles of lines already operated by a company called American Electric Power. The cost would be high, $60 billion or more spread across many years and tens of millions of electrical customers.
Read full at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/business/27grid.html