The smartest, greenest grid

What a little Danish island is showing the world about the future of energy. On Christmas night, Maja Bendtsen and her husband were curled up on the couch watching TV in their cozy house on the Danish island of Bornholm. Suddenly the house lost power. "The lights flickered briefly and then everything went black," Bendtsen recalls. Peeking out the window, they saw that the whole neighborhood was dark. A few quick phone calls confirmed that all of Bornholm was without power. Bendtsen, an engineer with the island's utility, Ostkraft Net, mentally ruled out the obvious culprits: It wasn't a particularly busy night, as Christmas festivities had wrapped up with the midday meal, nor was the weather particularly cold or stormy. She thought of one thing, though, and it made her heart sink. She phoned the Ostkraft control room, where the chief engineer confirmed her suspicion: A ship dragging its anchor in the narrow Baltic Sea channel between Bornholm and Sweden had severed the 60-kilovolt, 70-megawatt undersea power cable that is the island's only external source of electricity. It would take a repair crew more than six weeks to pinpoint the damage, haul the cable to the water's surface, and fix it.