On particularly sunny or windydays, leaders in renewable energy like Germany now produce more electricity from renewable sources than their grids can handle.
The California Zephyr was launched in 1949 to lure the latter, taking them on a 2, 500-mile journey between the Windy City and the Californian coast in three days.
The weather for the next four days is set to warm up following a spell of cool, windy conditions in practice and should help scoring, alleviating the feeling in some quarters that the event has lost its magic following two years of harsh weather allied to a toughening up of the course.