New North Sea windfarms to get multi-national connections...

Yes, right up to the point where countries on the eurpean continent pull the plug under protest from their 'locals' because local prices are being driven up by demand from those countries whose generating capacity has not been invested in over the decades. Look at the situation in Norway right now. Their govt is talking about turring off the taps to external cusotmers because foreign demand is driving up prices. Another vulnerabilty is over reliance upon the French - no wonder they won't act on stopping illegal immigration when all they have to do is to threaten to turn off the UK-Franco interconnections if we so much as push the issue beyond certain boundaries..

Yes, right up to the point where countries on the eurpean continent pull the plug under protest from their 'locals' because local prices are being driven up by demand from those countries whose generating capacity has not been invested in over the decades. Look at the situation in Norway right now. Their govt is talking about turring off the taps to external cusotmers because foreign demand is driving up prices. Another vulnerabilty is over reliance upon the French - no wonder they won't act on stopping illegal immigration when all they have to do is to threaten to turn off the UK-Franco interconnections if we so much as push the issue beyond certain boundaries..

up to the point where countries on the eurpean continent pull the plug under protest from their 'locals' because local prices are being driven up by demand

The way I read it, these interconnectors will only import into a country, not export, so "pulling the plug" at their own end wouldn't help their domestic arrangements at all. They might find at times there's international competition for the windfarm's output, which might push up the cost of the imports - but that hardly any worse than buying gas (or any other fuel) from the open markets.

Perhaps they could be re-configured into more general multi-directional interconnectors (from an engineerring point of view, the extra resilience for the overall grids could be quite useful) but that doesn't seem to be the intention.

     - Andy.