OK, imagine this. You're in the UK, it's grey and
raining as usual, and someone pitches you the idea to run a
4000 kilometer extension cord from your house to the deserts
of Morocco so that you can power your kettle with solar energy.
That's basically what X Links the now cancelled green energy
power project was in what was supposed to be a triumph of
engineering and climate ambition.
The X Links Morocco UK Power project was designed to be a 77
square mile solar array, a 580 square mile wind farm and A50
square mile battery array, all based in Morocco and connected
to the UK with the world's longest undersea power cable.
The project would have supplied 8% of EU KS electricity at a
cost of £24 billion. And that's if you believe that
there wouldn't be cost overruns, which there always are.
Critics of the project called it green colonialism, with
Greenpeace saying that it was just another case of the global
N exploiting the global S for energy.
While Africa's strong solar and wind potential make it an
attractive place to produce green energy, many residents
question that the energy should be exported rather than used
internally. Unfortunately, the X Links
project has joined a growing graveyard of planned megaproject
that are grand in vision, bloated in cost and ultimately
undone by their own complexity. From high speed rail lines that
never reached their destination to nuclear plants with
underwater acoustic systems dubbed the fish disco by the
press, which is supposed to deter marine life, Western
countries have become astonishingly bad at building
core infrastructure. The question is no longer why
these projects fail, but whether we've forgotten how to succeed.
X Links was supposed to be privately funded, but the
developers were depending on a 25 year contract for difference
or CFD from the UK government. Which is a fancy way of saying
we'll build it, but the government has to guarantee us a
fixed price for the electricity for the next 25 years.
So while not officially subsidized, this was a type of
subsidy and the project won't be going ahead without it.
That electricity price 70 to 80 lbs per MW hour, which is
actually not bad for the UK. It's cheaper than nuclear and
competitive with offshore wind, but it's by no means a bargain.
It's about 3 times the wholesale cost of electricity in the
United States, so energy hungry industry would still be at a
significant disadvantage if manufacturing in the UK.
That contract for difference would have meant billions of
pounds in government price guarantees over the next 25
years. So let's talk about transmission
losses next. High voltage direct current, or
HVDC cables lose about 3 1/2% of their power per 1000 kilometers.
With a 4000 kilometer cable, that's 14% in losses.
Then you've got battery losses on top of that of another 10 to
15%. So you're losing more than 1/4
of your energy before it even hits the UK grid.
Imagine ordering a pizza and the delivery guy eats a quarter of
it on the way. That's essentially what X Links
is. The project's estimated cost
jumped from 20 billion to £24 billion before a single solar
panel was installed. The planned battery array would
have been 16 times larger than the world's largest completed
battery system. Occupying 50 square miles in the
Moroccan desert, the subsea cable would have been the
longest in the world, traversing deep sea environments and
multiple jurisdictions. Channels like the Common Sense
Skeptic have criticized similar ideas that have been pitched in
the United States due to their reliance on unproven scale, the
vulnerability to transmission losses and the sheer material
intensity of the battery systems.
The singular vulnerability to terrorist attacks and damage
from storms or extreme weather events too.
Ed Miliband, the UK's energy secretary, rejected the proposal
a few weeks ago. The project, he said, had too
many holes and didn't provide value for money.
He cited security concerns, delivery risk and the lack of
domestic economic benefit. He expressed a preference for
home grown renewables. So translation, we'd rather
build wind farms in Yorkshire than run a 4000 kilometre
extension cord to Africa. X Links is unfortunately not an
outlier. It's part of the bigger pattern.
The UK's infrastructure ambitions are littered with
projects that start with fanfare and then in farce.
HS2, the high speed rail line it meant to connect London to the
north, so it's northern like scrapped after costs ballooned
past £100 billion. Along the way it spent £119
million on a special tunnel to preserve a protected bad column,
despite there being no evidence the high speed trains interfere
with that. Then there's Hinkley Point C,
the nuclear plant in Somerset now expected to cost £46
billion. Among its more surprising
features was the proposed Fish Disco, an acoustic deterrent
system designed to keep marine life away from the cooling water
intake. EDF, the plant's developer,
tried to abandon this part of the plan, citing Diverse safety
and questionable effectiveness, but environmental campaigners
pushed back. The fish disco may have to go
ahead. Britain's failed infrastructure
projects reflect A deeper malaise, not just in the UK but
in much of the developed world, of a system of development that
over promises, under delivers and gets bogged down in a tangle
of regulation, litigation and political risk aversion.
As the Danish economist Ben Fleiber has noted, megaprojects
are almost always over budget, overtime and under benefit due
to a mix of psychological bias, political incentives and
structural complexity. He identifies A phenomenon he
calls the Iron Law of megaprojects, where 9 out of 10
projects incur cost overruns, delays, or fail to deliver
expected benefits. This poor performance is driven
by what he terms the Four sublimes, the technological,
political, economic, and aesthetic thrills that motivate
planners to pursue grand projects, often at the expense
of realism. When this is combined with
flawed forecasting, strategic misrepresentation, and a
tendency to ignore lessons of the past, these forces lead to
what he calls the survival of the unfittest, where the most
misleadingly optimistic projects are approved but are then the
most likely to fail. Megaprojects are tangible,
garner attention, and lend an air of proactiveness to
political leaders. On top of that, they tend to be
media magnets, and the attention they draw appeals to promoters
who enjoy a few things more than the visibility they get from
announcing a new mega project. A few months ago, I was
listening to a podcast from the Irish economist David McWilliams
called Why Do Good People Make Bad Decisions?
In the podcast, he pointed out that mega projects didn't always
stall out like they seem to today.
He used the example of Ireland in the 1920s, which had just
come through a war of independence, a civil war and
with a fragile democracy in place, managed to build the
Ardna Crusha hydroelectric plant in just three years.
Ireland at the time was a post colonial state with no money, no
industry and no energy. It had what's described as a
beer and biscuits economy where the only real industry in the
country was Guinness's and Jacobs, both of which drew on
agriculture. So there was no real industrial
base at all. There were no large deposits of
fossil fuels in Ireland like there were in other European
countries. So there had been no real
industrial revolution where cheap energy could be converted
into production. Irish people instead moved
abroad if they wanted to find jobs in industry.
Electricity was a very new technology at the time and the
leadership of the country spent 20% of GDP over three years to
build Ardna Crusha, a hydroelectric power plant which
until the Hoover Dam was built in 1933, was the largest
hydroelectric dam in the world. The country also built an
electrical grid which brought power not just to cities but to
farms all over the country. Between 1937 and 1947, the River
Liffey was dammed at Pula Fuca to build a second hydroelectric
station. This dam created a reservoir
that delivered fresh drinking water to every home in Dublin.
So why was a poor country able to build huge high tech
infrastructure like this in just a few years, which benefited
most of the population and dragged the country into the
modern world, when today it's impossible to build enough
housing for the population or even a new road?
McWilliams argues in this podcast that western societies
have today become victims of hyper democracy, a system where
everyone has a veto but no one has responsibility.
He argues that well-intentioned regulation, environmentalism,
Nimbyism and localism have created a system so overburdened
that even basic infrastructure becomes impossible to deliver.
As an example, let's talk about Hinckley Point C, Britain's
flagship nuclear project, which also happens to be the most
expensive nuclear power station that has ever been built.
Hinkley Point C is 4 times more expensive per MW to similar
plants that are being built in South Korea, and even costs 25%
more than a near identical plant in France that was built by the
same company. Why is it so much more expensive
than because in Britain we can't just build things, we have to
reinvent them. Instead of just building a
proven design, it was decided to modify it a lot.
EU KS nuclear regulator required 7000 design changes to Ed FS
already approved reactor. The changes required 25% more
concrete, 35% more steel, and a reactor so bespoke it's now
known known as the UKEPRA. Brand new design in everything
but name. To protect 45 tons of fish per
year, less than a small fishing boat catches.
EDF was asked to install 288 underwater speakers blasting
noise to scare the fish away. I'm guessing Michael Bolton,
Phil Collins, or something like that.
This is expensive, it's risky for divers, and it might delay
the entire project. All this while climate change, a
bigger threat to biodiversity, marches on.
Even though multiple versions of this plant have already been
built, a 31,000 page environmental impact assessment
was needed, and then even minor changes trigger new planning
applications, legal reviews and years of delay.
Compare that to Ireland in the 1920s, where a poor country with
no industrial base was able to build the largest hydroelectric
plant in the world in just three years.
Today, we can't even build a road without a decade of
consultations and possibly a tunnel for bats.
My point isn't that we should give up on big projects, it's
that we should stop making them needlessly complicated.
South Korea builds fleets of reactors using the same design
over and over again. They've mastered replication
while we've mastered reinvention.
If we want to fix our energy problems in the West, we need to
stop treating every project like a blank slate.
We need to build like the South Koreans, pragmatic, modular, and
fast. Not because we're in a rush, but
because it's so wasteful, constantly tripping over our own
feet. And there's a huge cost
associated with the time wasted on planned projects that are
never completed. This isn't the situation
everywhere, however. We discussed in a recent video
how in the 1990s and 2000s, Madrid managed to triple the
length of its metro system in just 12 years, and they made
these upgrades faster and cheaper than almost any other
city in the world. In Madrid, a 35 mile metro
expansion cost around $2.8 billion, which adjusted for
inflation is about the same as New York's 1 1/2 mile extension
of the Seven Subway to Hudson Yard cost.
The paradox is this. The more we care about doing
things right, environmentally, socially and politically, the
less we seem to be able to do anything at all.
Environmentalists oppose wind farms.
Housing advocates block density. Governments outsource delivery
but retain all the risk. The end result is paralysis.
Megaprojects like Xlenx are a system of this dysfunction.
Too big to fail, too complex to succeed.
They promise to solve every problem all at once, climate,
cost, security, but then collapse under the weight of
their own ambition. There may be a better way, where
instead of betting on unproven megaprojects, governments could
focus on pragmatic, modular and proven solutions to the problems
faced by their citizens. Things like grid up grades,
domestic renewables, interconnectors with redundancy
and public transport built to cost, not to impress.
Madrid's metro, Singapore's grid strategy and Ireland's Turlock
Hill pump storage plant are all examples of infrastructure that
works because it was designed with delivery in mind, where the
key is speed, simplicity and replicability, not scale and
spectacle. One of the most underappreciated
risks of the 6 Links project was its reliance on a single ultra
long subsea cable. Recent incidents have
highlighted the vulnerability of undersea infrastructure.
Ships dragging anchors, fishing activity, and even suspected
sabotage have all caused cable cuts in strategic areas like the
Baltic Sea and around Taiwan. These acts are increasingly
being described as a form of Gray zone warfare, covert
actions designed to weaken infrastructure with plausible
deniability. The existence of a Chinese
patent for a towed submarine cable cutting device only adds
to this concern. In this context, X Links begins
to look less like a resilient energy solution and more like a
fragile lifeline waiting to be severed.
The likelihood of the X Links project coming in on budget was
extremely low based on the various risk factors and on
historical precedent. First up, the project had
already experienced significant cost escalation before
construction even began. Initial estimates of £16 billion
balloon to £20 billion and then 24 billion, a 50% increase,
mirroring the trajectory of other UK mega projects like HS2
and Hinkley Point C Second, the scale and complexity of X links
were unprecedented. The 22.5 GW hour battery array
would have been 16 times larger than the world's largest
completed battery system, requiring over 5700 battery
megapacks and occupying around 50 square miles.
The 4000 kilometers subsea HVDC cable would have been the
longest in the world, traversing deep sea environments and
multiple jurisdictions. No company involved had
previously delivered a project of this scale.
Third, the project was exposed to geopolitical and regulatory
risks. The cables route through
international waters raised concerns about sabotage and
jurisdictional disputes. The UK government ultimately
cited security concerns and the lack of a domestic supply chain
benefits as reasons for withdrawing support. 4th
historical precedent suggests that mega projects of this
nature rarely stay on budget, and the larger and more novel
the project, the greater the likelihood of failure.
Finally, the analysis done by Common Sense Skeptic on a
similar proposed project in the United States highlighted
material constraints, storage inefficiencies, and transmission
losses that would have plagued the project.
The battery array alone would have required massive quantities
of lithium and other materials, potentially beyond existing
known global supplies. In short, X Links fit the
profile of a project that promised too much too soon and
would almost certainly have required additional public
funding or scope reductions to survive.
The developed world doesn't lack money or technology.
It instead lacks institutional clarity and political courage.
We need to shift from grandiosity to delivery, from
spectacle to substance. If we want to decarbonize, house
people, and modernize our economies.
We don't need more X links. We need to remember how to
build. Thanks for tuning into this
week's podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and
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Soldiers released. Have a great day and talk to you
again soon. Bye.