It’s a sure bet that when people descend upon Berlin next week for the grids conference that the European Wind Energy Association has organised, delegates attending the event will still be buzzing from recent timely news out of Brussels.

Those attending the two-day conference — “GRIDS 2010: the backbone of Europe’s energy future” — will almost assuredly be discussing Wednesday’s communication from the European Commission that €200 billion is needed to upgrade Europe’s gas and electricity grids over the next 10 years.

Some of the chatter around the coffee tables will also probably focus on another Commission communication — released on 10 November — which noted that the European Union is unlikely to achieve its 2020 targets without regional energy investments in the order of €1 trillion over the next decade.

With under a month to go, the competition to win a weekend in Copenhagen or the Swiss Alps as part of EWEA’s Breath of Fresh Air campaign is growing fierce. One of the strongest contenders for a prize is 26 year old Bruno Mignogna from Molise in Italy, who works at the national agency for Energy and the Environment (ENEA) in Rome. He told us why he decided to adopt a turbine and tell his friends about it.

Why do you support wind energy?

In 1998, the first wind turbines were installed close to where my grandfather lived in the region where I come from, Molise. (The turbine I adopted on www.ewea.org/freshair is one of these). Since then I started studying how wind energy works, and during my studies I saw many wind farms being put up, with turbines that got bigger and bigger!

The power of wind was invoked Sunday in one of the world’s most troubled nations when Pakistan and the US agreed on a public-private partnership to develop a 150-MW wind energy facility capable of creating enough electricity for 600,000 local homes.

“This project represents a meaningful, environmentally sound step toward addressing Pakistan’s energy crisis,” Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said in a press release.

“Partnership with the private sector will also demonstrate the potential of investing in the power sector in Pakistan.”

Imagine not being able to buy food or clothing from any country apart from your own. How boring – and expensive – our lives would be. Yet this is the case with most of our electricity. Because our power grids have few links between countries, 95% of power in Europe is consumed in the country in which it is produced.

An updated, Europe-wide power grid, with stronger, more numerous interconnectors, would allow wind power to be transported from wherever in Europe it’s blowing to wherever in Europe the consumers are, and open up cross-border trade in electricity.

Opening up the power market in Europe would have a far greater impact on thousands of consumers, bringing prices down as fuel-free wind power and other renewables would be preferred by the market to fossil fuels with unpredictable costs.

In an impressively unique attempt to promote the global need for the creation of green jobs, world leaders attending last week’s G20 summit in Seoul were each asked to set aside one hour in the next few months to learn how their countries can benefit by economic solutions to complex 21^st century problems.

“Creating green jobs on a massive scale is a two-way street,” Ditlev Engel, President and CEO of Vestas Wind Systems A/S, said in a press release announcing the plan put forth at the G20 Business Summit, a largely unreported side session to the main meeting, by a working group for creating green jobs.

“Give us the policy frameworks, and we’ll give you the results. We’ll make the investments, we’ll take the risks, and we’ll create the jobs. But this requires a policy framework that re-balances the incentives indisputably in favour of green investment.”