even as the waters now slowly subside, scientist, a climate change will make such a catastrophic events even more frequent. a big stone dw plan today with a story about the plan to send us reagan, solar energy, to agents. i paid for zillow and i'll see you next. now. the so you don't think and feel the same way you expect. and one different thing in some lines in your parent. i just want to pursue what that's nice on fire or you think your kid is 2 different, risky, irresponsible,

of unreasonable, all stuff. i want my son to become a doctor to indicate it's time to to and then when generation class, which now on the dw documentary, the in 2018 as training entrepreneur david griffin, started a company based on a crazy idea of what if you could generate a lot of solar power in northern australia, which has some of the strongest sunshine in the world. and so it's a single pool which consumes pates of energy per person, per se from fossil fuels. and it's pretty much no space to renewables if it's our make sense, right? and it turns out he's not the 1st person to have this type of idea. there are a lot of places around the world, but few people, lots of sun and wind, that we need to start using to power cities and countries. far away was even the idea to create a kind of global, super great, allowing us to shift loads of enabled energy from where it's abundant to where it's

needed. and all you really need is a lot of very, very long cables. but we've all read the title of the video. something went wrong with griffin's idea. so let's look into what it was and what it means for this and vicious vision of a well, that's sharing it's clean electricity. this map shows the potential solar power available around the world. and this one shows the same thing for wind. it's pretty clear that some areas get a lot more of one or boats than others. so rather than only consuming that clean energy within the borders of the country producing it, it might make a lot more sense to spread it around. to share this energy, it needs to go through something called an input connect up, which is a high voltage cable that can transfer power one way, or in some cases back and forth between the 2 locations. if you have an interconnect, uh you can have cleaner and cheap apollo coming from a neighboring system, which the neighboring system was, have benefits from to us. that's elizabeth promotional energy and climate data analyst. she says, europe already has

a pretty established system of interconnected which allow some countries to buy and sell clean energy based on supply and demand. and there's always room for mold. we look at the region as a whole, you have clear areas with huge resource potential. so in the politics with the voltage, so you have huge off showing potential, same in the block c as well. and the countries that border on these areas with huge wind potential are not necessarily the ones that actually exist. if you look at them, poland, i'm sensing they bring jammed news was huge, huge them all incentives which currently all can see me in huge amounts of code. if you have to increase that region and connectivity, you essentially tap into these big, big sources of wind and take it to where it's actually needed. that there's just no way possible without interconnection. this is a really big deal at this stage of the energy transition. advocates for the shift away from fossil fuels like the international energy agency. so you were getting pretty good at bringing renewable energy sources online fast. but if we cut and move the electricity to where it needs to be,

all the new clean energy becomes less useful. there are some groups trying to figure out how we could connect the grids of every country on us. the idea would be to increase regional connections, enough to eventually create a super great, a global network of interconnect is that would let us send electricity to wherever it needs to cover these ideas for super crew to still just the ideas the on the clear plans on how to actually make that happen on a vast scale for the table future. it's individual projects connecting countries and regions that are starting to shake decision of a global grid and making renewable energy more profitable along the way. you are encouraging that for this kind of renew, but investment in other countries because the investor knows i can. so to my neighboring country, this is a big demand through this and to connect as you create this business case, full renew both in the best of places. and there's very few better places going to stay here when it comes to sol. is this a very big multitude before, certainly, or argue with responsibility frustrating to provide power to other?

my niece is out that strategy escape remember david griffin, the guy from the beginning until last year, she says on the executive leadership team of his company, son, cable. so okay, was this fairly encompassing? that was phones with the purpose of taking a strategy as a bonding weed and sold race, souls, styles out of pocket for the region. and the scale of his company's plan was almost beyond belief. the idea was to build a 20 gigawatt solar farm on a massive stretch of land and australia is northern territory. that's almost 6 times more capacity than the current biggest solar farm and the world according to right. it's. and then that solar farm would fade into a battery system that's holding 13 times bigger than today's biggest. to send the energy from the solar farm and batteries abroad, the company would lay 3 submarine cables along the 4300 kilometers out from top and through engineers, motors to single meaning they would need more than 12000 kilometers of high voltage cables. today's long list, existing route is around 750 kilometers and well making oldest solar panels and all

those batteries would be hard getting all that cable turned out to be even hot. and that's because many of these cable manufacturers, which are mostly based in europe, already too busy supplying major pain market. so to get those thousands of kilometers of cable, some cable decided to just make it themselves big bounce plans to build their own manufacturing site. and it has maintenance by making these cables is not easy. those manufacturing pounds for a while really can see that it's operational type building. they're very high and high technology times since it's not a factor in. and so it takes many gains to build a test pattern facility. and once they get all that cable, they have to actually figure out where to put it. busy somewhere in cable routes have to avoid any and to see volcanoes or areas more prone to submarines. quakes on . the go to avoid shipping routes with bankers or fishing equipment, could damage the cables and big trenches that would leave the cable. floating goal

of that not being manufacturing and finding takes a lot of money. these trading age of housing is estimated to cost the equivalent of $23000000000.00 us dollars. and people familiar with projects like these say the final cost will likely be a lot more. but despite the scale of these problems, some people was starting to make progress. in 2019 the company secured the backing of 2 of us trailers biggest 1000000000 there investors, michael, kevin brooks, and andrew, far by the end of 2022. the company finished both a marine southern ministry in waters and more than 2 thirds of the indonesian section of the route had been mapped. and it had already begun talks with big cable manufacturers like prison unit, and heading to help build its new factory. the plan was to start turning out cables by 2023, and eventually deliver power to sing for by 2027. but in january of 2023, all that progress started to crumble. according to media reports, one of those big investors forest decided he wasn't happy with the direction of the project and clashed with the other investor of what the company should be doing

instead. and soon, this argument calls into question one of the most fundamental tots fund cable, the cable itself. one of the biggest challenges facing projects like sun cables interconnect though, is winning the trust of all the countries involved. each step of this extremely complicated process needs a new set of time consuming approvals to move along. and if one part doesn't get a green kick from one side of the other, the whole thing could collapse in countries being extremely cautious about this type of infrastructure. it does make a lot of sense. this isn't the 1st time we should energy along foss distances and so the whole thing back fine does not stream ring a bell in 2021. the pipeline from russian to germany supplied around 17 percent of the use natural gas imports. when russia shut down the pipeline, which the kremlin says was due to a combination of western sanctions over the invasion if you crane and then attack which sabotage the pipeline itself. europe, a scrambling to find new gas supplies to get it through the following winter, importing a big chunk of your energy from one place rather than a producing it yourself makes you dependent on that source to better or worse. and

so countries like single small islands nation surrounded by much beacon data, it's scary, especially given what happened pretty recently. in october 2021, malaysia decided to bend all exports of renewable energy to single through the country, the interconnect saying they needed those renewable sources themselves. this was a big issue for single, which was planning to start phasing out gas, the main energy source and use more renewables. so some cables, 10, which the company says would provide 15 percent single polls. electricity needs started to feel a lot riskier thing of. what if this trailer suddenly decided that it needed to turn off the top for whatever reason, or what is this huge cable going through another country's territorial waters was damaged, was sabotaged. how safe could single feel about switching everything over to a brand new source of energy? if it had to rely on a potentially less reliable supply? when you consider that those sorts of things that happened really quickly, we're not waiting for it to know most challenges full and she secured there could

be top 5 projects that could be disruptions to energy provision. it's not just as a result of a disruption from the supply side to the results, but actually made a motion as active and sorry, the sky was a problem with energy security. this is robin. this is robin law. according to media reports trying to get around all these concerns made 1st question, how viable the cable part of son cable would be. he decided it'd be better to use all that solar power in a completely different way by turning it into green hydrogen and ammonia. this is another way of moving renewable energy around. that's getting a lot of attention right now that you convert the clean electricity into fuel that you can ship anywhere in the world without the hassle of building a cable to connect those places. but while it has some things going for it, today's hydrogen isn't really thing up to its promise because of how inefficient you just to make compared to using well, sending that clean energy directly. we made a video on that here,

which is your take a look at off this one piece 2 competing visions of what to do with sun cables, plants, solar farms came to ahead in january 2023 according to media reports when the company missed 2 of its big milestones to get the approvals from single pole and intonation needed to stop letting these cables far as decided that the cable strategy wasn't going to work. if they wanted, he's money, they'd have to switch everything over to green hydrogen and ammonia, something the other investor can and brooks didn't agree with. the future of the project was in doubt. and without the support of both investors, the company collapsed. but that wasn't the end of the story. eventually, kevin brooks output for us to take ownership of sun cables in 2023 in eastern the age of housing project continues, but the drama did take its toll. the new plan is to start delivering power in the early 20 thirty's, but only to dollars the capital of a strategies northern territory. the connection to singapore is supposed to come a few use up to that. if it comes at all. because the company still has to solve the same problems. so convincing all the different players involved from

governments to investors, to suppliers. that this idea which has never been done before at the scale work. and besides, i'm very optimistic about the concepts and what fundamentals trying to i'm of the eventually a friendship between the started sing for the bills. the question was tom and how the tax. so what does some cable story mean for the vision of a global hypocrite? is putting down a cable between 2 countries, so such a struggle connecting the entire world seems pretty far off. but it's also not science fiction. there are other really vicious ideas to share and trade clean energy around the world from the ex thanks america, u. k. a power projects a full 1000 kilometer long cable, that according to media reports might even extend to germany to the north sea wind power plan to build wind farms and artificial islands and connect them to european countries around the north sea. so now a global net look does remain a distant dream. but if you think all the g political tensions and power games

involved to make it impossible, just consider there's another global network that connects every country on a few things submarine cables. you're using it right now to watch this video. the incident, transporting electricity around the globe is a bit different than translating data. of course, internet cables are cheaper and the telecommunication systems they're rooted in have been around for much longer. but it can be done. and for electricity, europe is the best example that with political will, it might even be easier than it seems. and the more of these connections we have, the more attractive it will become from other countries to join the super. great. so let us know what you're thinking, the comments where in the world do you want your green energy to come from? and make sure to subscribe to a journal. we really see videos every friday on the list and the other system issue in this, in the piano is known as the bully of classical music is our guest at tiny house concerts

and of course, making music the next on d. w. i haven't understanding the forest to say the people are trying to find this ecosystem resource is trying to change and it's working in 16 minutes on dw the cars, he's got issues or thoughts they will crazy the

the for this long talk to me in the existence of the u. s. dispute because i am yes i'm yes. can you hold on i can time look vince to this good success of money. the good . ready ready in this tiny house near the phone some rhineland ridge.