News Flash from the Glasgow newspaper, recently tossed on Scottish lawns:

"The increasing importance of wind power was high lighted yesterday as the energy source reached two significant landmarks.

For the first time in Scotland, onshore wind projects are now generating more electricity than all the country's hydro schemes put together.

Meanwhile, the UK has overtaken Denmark to become the world leader in building offshore windfarms.

Both are seen as important milestones in the renewable energy revolution, which was the focus of commercial and political attention yesterday."

Now Denmark has been King Wind, putting a huge push on wind power in a bid to achieve 50 percent of its generation from renewables. But the UK, a much bigger industrial power, is already getting 3,000 megawatts of wind power. And the Prime Minister is intent on seeing his neighboring North Sea become the Arabian Gulf of wind power. The ambition is to boost the wind totals by 25,000 megawatts."

Meanwhile, Scottand has long reaped the output of 145 hydro plants. So the surge in wind power of late is noteworthy.

Of course, this is hugely important to us in the United States, where skeptics have long pooh-poohed wind as an intermittent resource that has to be used or lost - and transported vast distances to reach consumers. Well, the U.S .is a much bigger land than the UK, so some of the pioneering work there may not help us with the problem of transportnig wind power vast distances.

But to the extent that the wind resource can we aborbed into the power grid and accomodated - regardless of its eccentricities - that would be important information to energy planners here in the United States. I have seen labs in central Denmark that are developing the IT might to dispatch a far-flung army of wind turbines as efficiently as today's systems that relies on a relatively few large central generating stations. No doubt about it, the Europeans are gaining some useful intelligence.