Research journals are filled with clever ideas that never quite come to fruition in the form of a successful commercial venture. Technical glitches, a failure to scale, or some sort of unforeseen limitation keep some of the best research from ever having the impact that it might. That's why it was a pleasant surprise to see that one of the more compelling ideas of the last few years is inching its way toward reality.

Back in 2010, a group of researchers proposed an intriguing scheme that would take an intermittent source of power—wind energy—and convert it into something closer to baseline power. The goal would be to wire up wind farms off the East Coast of the US into one giant generating system that, given the region's prevailing wind pattern, would almost always be guaranteed to be producing a minimum amount of power.

It seemed like a brilliant idea that would almost certainly languish in obscurity. So the fact that the Department of the Interior has taken the first step toward approving it this week was a bit of a pleasant surprise.

The idea behind the project is pretty simple: a local source of wind power tends to be at the mercy of the prevailing weather conditions. On the East Coast, storms tend to form towards the south and take a roughly northeasterly track along the coast. So, if some weather leaves calm in its wake in the Carolinas, the chances are good that it's currently stirring things up in the neighborhood of New York City. This pattern means that it's extremely rare for the entire Eastern Seaboard to be calm. If you spread wind generators up and down the coast, some of them would almost always be producing power.

In a typical setup, that would just mean that the grids in some areas would be receiving wind power, while others might be looking for some form of backup generation. That's why the 2010 study proposed linking them all together through a single transmission system, and feeding that into the grid at a limited number of locations. That way, each of those sites would be getting power that may be a bit erratic, but would almost never drop below some minimum figure. The East Coast also makes for an appealing offshore wind construction area, since the continental shelf is fairly shallow in most areas.

Since the paper was published, a project to do just this has been attracting investors, Google among them. This week, the Department of the Interior announced that it took the first step toward approving an early stage of the offshore connector. The venture is looking to put a high-voltage, direct-current line in federal waters between northern New Jersey and Virginia. The DOI has recognized that no other company is planning to do so, and has given the project the go ahead to seek an environmental review.

The approval came despite the fact that there are no offshore wind farms in place at the moment. As it turns out, the project makes a degree of financial sense on its own, and could be a key enabler of wind farm installation.

As The New York Times notes, any offshore wind farms that are built will have to find some way of getting their power to shore. Under a typical design, each wind farm would be on its own, getting permits and building the infrastructure needed to feed into a local grid. Under the setup proposed here, each farm would just have to plug in to the off-shore cable, which would then plug in at a limited number of sites.

The cable could even perform a function before the first wind farm gets built. For various reasons (many discussed here), electric power is pretty expensive in New Jersey, which already imports a lot of it from out-of-state. A direct wire to Virginia would add a degree of flexibility, and quite possibly offer lower prices to consumers.

The project is a long way from being reality, but it's clearly attracted some serious investors. It also looks to have been greeted with enthusiasm by the DOI, which will ultimately be responsible for issuing permits. And that's a lot further than many other clever ideas hatched in academia ever make it.