so you miss nothing about is on the w travel. i hope you enjoy the trip here as much as i did about you. what's your opinion? feel free to write your thoughts and the comments. the how's the good old days of the west, german economic miracle, and the 1950s when the government promised prosperity for 10 years ago, germany was still the world's top exporter. but in a series of setbacks, the coal good pandemic, the war and ukraine can, the energy crisis have left the countries industry under clinic, custom pressure can't get back on track. also on the show, green hydrogen po, for hype, solar power via cables, a viable undertaking was making a big in germany,

germany once the economic powerhouse of europe, known for quality and innovation. but today the made in germany images taking a beating the death certificate logon at which the gym and economy is in a tough position. and we're in another year for section one. so why is this happening? exclusive of the biggest problem right now is the gloomy move to the economy is 80 percent psychology. so what now we're in the truck right now and things are slowly looking at no cost. one in 4 jobs here depends on exports, which is a vulnerability when it comes to the economy. exports on lagging and that's the key to the gym and economy on most 40 or 45 percent of our economic

outputs are expos on at the moment, do you mind is logging on and i'll be i'm after a peek in 2022 german exports dropped in 2023 and then recovered slightly in 2024 and compared to global economic growth, germany is floundering in the 3rd quarter of 2024, g d p in the us grew by 2.8 percent. germany's economy is stagnating. francis recovery and springs economy group by 0.8 percent. the way home the i've had for quite some time. we've seen the structural conditions grow increasingly difficult or to do things like a shortage of skilled labor system. i collected all crumbling infrastructure too much bureaucracy here mix. what we're seeing is that the economic outlook is the

peasant mistake economic outlook house, which is being accompanied by increasing structural problem accidents will prevent companies. germany's mid sized companies have a key role to play. mid sized companies make up about 90 percent of businesses here and employed 55 percent of the working population. germany doesn't only have large industry or mid sized companies form the backbone of our system. a deal, it says there is a heart beat, the posts that measures how healthy and robust the german economy is and whether it can meet the challenges that lie ahead you seen as in the mid sized sector here is known for innovation flexibility. and it's focus on customer needs, but it's also facing many challenges. mid sized companies are looking for solutions to stay competitive. for example, when it comes to finding skilled labor practice companies can do

a lot in this respect, making themselves attractive. as in boy, as offering company benefits, which can help attract more workers, more skilled workers, and they knew what uh, product. you took the test onto the team, i live with the name, this is the whole company's nature, reflect on ways they can future proof. their operations become more innovative about that facing increasingly tough competition, especially from asian and american companies. suffice for example, with respect to the digitalization of processes, and that includes both big industry on small or mid sized service enterprises. i mean, labor shortages are crumbling, infrastructure, and complicated bureaucracy are increasingly affecting economic competitiveness. germany's image on the international stage is also dented. so is the country at an impasse before is to georgia, is what a german economy is still the biggest driver and the european economy was this was a part of a tanker that has

a hard time changing course that needs to speed up in order to recover the reputation it had 10 years ago, you went all the way into the company via is equal to yeah. so with 70 reforms and a fresh wave of optimism, germany should be able to get its economy coming again. another factor affecting economic performance is you is, if you ever been unfit to work, not a big deal if you're in germany except the frequency of people taking sick leave is increasing cause for concern. how sick is germany? trains canceled, government offices shut no school classes and deserted building sites for too many people off sick and to few people to fill in. in germany. sick leave

is on the rise. in 2023 employees average to 15 days off due to illness. without all those sick leave, the german economy is good and have shrunk by 0.3 percent last year. instead of grown by point 5 percent. according to an employer's association. labor organizations argue that rising, sickly is due to people feeling over worked and undervalued. others blame misguided incentives like being able to just phone in for a sick note. overly lenient doctors and paid sickly in the us were paid sickly visit mandatory far fewer people call in and fit to work the window germany. a sick note doesn't require you to stay home. you can go to work if you're not contagious. and then there are, the bakers says the lawn must. she wants to check up on workers who call in sick. a

better idea is to improve the work environment. so that everyone feels value, that's been a recipe for success and many companies. this was a good idea, winning ourselves, all fossil fuels and switching to hydrogen by daily of the green variety. could the idea of a future powered by hydrogen become reality? for his it's destined to remain just a dream. the green hydrogen made out of renewable energy. it's been touted as a pillar of the energy transition in germany. plants to invest billions into green hydrogen. but how realistic are these ambitious plans? entire fleets of hydrogen powered trains, art running the 1st hydrogen filling stations have

already been dismantled. there weren't enough customers. the there are only a handful of hydrogen power train still in operation here. and the diesel powered bosses are slower and often one late officer for the farm, especially the best has in service, but often it's not running on the schedule, especially in the morning when we're headed to school. so my consist of home in these and yeah, this year has been very, very difficult when it comes to best and trained services. the trains basically aren't running. and when they do, they're constantly out of service. and you know, mas hall, and buddha, interested in you all's palace. even though the hydrogen trains are brand new, the crucial fuel cells often malfunction the, the trains that are unreliable are taken out of service. the transportation

companies are annoyed that all diesel locomotives and bosses have to be brought back into service and that there aren't enough spare parts for the hydrogen trains as well. just taking the initial technical problems began shortly after the 1st batch of trains were brought into service for bloom on the time. we had a problem with the tank systems which often end up leaking events describing the slides. the 2nd problem involve the fuel cells. so, but this is, that's what we're dealing with right now. on the 3rd ups for jan is also been a variety of problems with the software, the email, including with water links, which then affected the electrical components and the installation of the act. so you only done the electrician voltage until now, stone, the manufacturer for the additional cost. the french company makes the hydrogen trains in germany. and the problem late and fuel cells come from canada. despite the bumping ride austin wants to stick with hydrogen technology. that's the ones

didn't stop. of course we didn't expect the launch to go the way it did with facing challenges. so we have to find solutions for the bed on the list. we're going to incorporate a new generation of fuel cells in the vehicle. so to bring then we're confident that when that happens, the vehicles will also stable on sustainable service to be on the high page of the cycle until the this tractor also use a fuel cells to run on hydrogen it's maker fend plants to replace diesel engines and it's farmed vehicles and machinery with hydrogen motors. the company preferred not to comment on camera, but did say that the technology still needs to be optimized as a scan that had it solving. generally speaking, when policy goes all in to promote a technology. so there's, there's always a chance that projects that aren't quite ready, we'll go into service like the that's in place and this has to be, i, but it's too soon to say that a technology like fuel cells has no future dvd print of 10. that would be

a mistake to help it how strengths still work to be done stacked, but there's a lot of potential about for you to put in. so the apex company is one example of how a large scale hydrogen economy might work. in this pilot plant, green electricity is used to generate hydrogen. they've been optimizing the technology for years. and so far they haven't had any major breakdown. the hydrogen, the produce is used in a fleet of $57.00 local service bosses. but this hydrogen production only pays off for the company with state subsidies and inexpensive can like tricity. yeah, transformation process will take at least another 10 or 15 years until we have a profit on market ready hydrogen economy. yeah, we're starting to ramp up right now, so they get in the next 2 to 3 years. we'll see you set up the necessary capacities who will supply the hydrogen that will make this transformation possible with an

industry. so me and kind of it's possible that all this is little more than a pipe dream. for the plan to work, hydrogen would need to be transported through a pipeline network to the major consumers, like the steel and segment industries. existing pipelines could be incorporated into the supply network, which would extend over more than 9000 kilometers. europe still has a technological edge, but there's a risk that cheaper hydrogen technology from china could compete with europe as happens with photo voltaic and wind energy technology. that an interview will have a window of 3 years in which year will be competitive when it comes to generating and using green hydrogen. and then will be overtaken by other industrial nations from i'm not going to spend the establishing hydrogen as an alternative source of energy will be harder than anticipated. but one thing is clear. european countries have their work cut out for them. the

once upon a time, europe had an idea for an alternative source of energy, importing solar power harvested in north africa. the aptly named project, desert tech. sadly, that dream faded with over ambitious scheduling and expectations that major investors backing out transporting solar power over a long distance. this is a daunting challenge. in 2018 is trading entrepreneur david griffin, started the company based on a crazy idea of what did 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 pole which consumes pates of energy purpose and especially from fossil fuels. and it's pretty much no space to renewables. and that'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 is even the idea to create a kind of global, super great, allowing us to shift loads of renewable 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 something went wrong with christians idea, so let's look into what it was and what it means for this ambitious vision of a well, the sharing is clean electricity. 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 inch to 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 clean uh and cheap apollo coming from a neighboring system, which the neighboring system would have benefits from to us. that's elizabeth promot, an energy and climate data analyst. 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, say we're getting pretty good at bringing renewable energy sources online fast. but if we could move that an extra city 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 electricity to wherever it needs to go. and there's very few better places that australia, when it comes to sol, solved cables. this fairly encompassing, that was phones with the purpose of taking a strategy as a bonding wind and solar race, souls i scale. so i'm not sure if it region 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, kate. 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 i'm 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. but you know, it's plans to build their own manufacturing site. it has maintenance by making these cables is not easy. and once they get all that cable,

they have to actually figure out where to put it a. busy summary and cable routes have to avoid any odyssey volcanoes or areas mold prone to sub marino's quakes that go to avoid shipping routes with inc. his or fishing equipment could damage the cables and the big trenches that would leave the cable. floating gold about not being manufacturing and signing takes a lot of money. the straight your 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 traders. biggest 1000000000 there are investors, michael, kevin brooks, and andrew, far. but in january of 2023 old at 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 a what the company should be doing instead. and soon, this argument calls into question one of the most fundamental tots of fund cable,

the cable itself importing a big chunk of your energy from one place rather than a producing it yourself makes you dependent on that source for better or what's in the countries like single, small islands nation surrounded by much beacon data. it's not scary. well, what is this huge cable going through? another country's territory was, was done as well 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. no, it's not just as a result of a disruption from the supply side to the results, but actually made a motion as active as 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 the 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 that clean electricity into fuel that you can ship anywhere in the world without the hassle of building a cable to connect those places. these 2 competing visions of what to do with sun cables, plants, solar farms came to a head in january 2023. according to media reports, when the company missed 2 of its big milestones, to get the approvals from single pool and in the nation needed to start laying these cables far as decided that the cable strategy wasn't going to work. if they wanted his money that have to switch everything over to green hydrogen and ammonia something the other investor can 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 outbid 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 single port is supposed to come a few years after that. if that 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. but this idea which has never been done before at the scale, work and be safe. so what does some cable story mean for the vision of a global secret is putting down a cable between 2 countries. such a struggle connecting the entire world seems pretty far off, but it's also not science section. so now a global net look does remain a distant dream. but if you think all the geopolitical tensions and power games involved to make it impossible, just consider there's another global network that connects every country, you know, excusing summer and 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.

the german economy needs talented young people from abroad for eager to get things done. career wise, well, also bringing customs and cultural experiences from back home with them. today. we feature a young woman from indonesia who got her starting i t before turning her passion for furniture into a business i arise on march 2016. and my 1st impression was germany was really cold. the people are sold fall and they speak really like quickly as long as you 1st and understand what they say at 1st. the reason behind why i want to go up for is like i want to know the people are from the other culture. when i went to germany, i don't know the culture yet. i don't know what the land. yep. i don't even speak

the language. yeah. so uh, through the deputation pro fast. i learn a lot and that's awful shape me. i am why i'm today. rebecca invested in denisia after finishing high school. she did a bachelor's in business administration in germany. after that, she became a manager in the i t sector and founded the luxury company job about i started my carrier as a marketing in the i p industry since 2019, currently on virginia pon pon, it's a silver house and mainly our clients are people the clients and we are offering a software solution, a platform solution, mainly for the entertain doctorates. the gather with my theme in the sales, we are preparing online and offline campaigns. we are preparing the social media on fence and we also preparing events. in indonesia,

you have to fully respect your bosses. so you have the strong of humor cold. but here in germany you tend to have more flatter here or tea. so if you want to fix on it, and if you want to ask the question, you can go directly to your boss and then discuss it with them. and i feel like here in germany, you have more room to, to experiments, was alongside her job and the i t industry. rebecca founded the high end furniture company java bell. i asked on jennifer val, it's because my grandpa started his with working business in 9th. and this happened fees in sort of out that it's a small city in the central java. and it was a to stream of my grandpa to sell. the furniture was fine, and my grandpa possibly on 2022,

but he threw me leave on until now. this one of our clients are what has apartments and restaurants, the enter your architect school is design. the furniture based on the client needs be produced safe and we ship it by containers. so to see fred, to germany, what's really make in a nation furniture special is it's not a mass production. so we did it best on the fly and it's, it's not about the furniture only, but over the thrive to sions. the craftmanship hadn't made at all. the furniture are made from our people, back indonesia, in terms of sustainability. i'm also really proud that a lot of information productions currently be really trying to minimize the ways the ways from the for his are production. we can use it to create a complete new products such as new verse,

such as state corporation. and we'll find else to take part the declaration. the most important thing to the successful in germany is 1st with down to the officers. that's the 1st. and the 2nd is to law off your job. because on me, when killed last something you do, you're generating innovation new generating fresh ideas. i am now around 12000 kilometers to waste from home. so i do feel homesick this the year in germany. i also have a good friends. good call it is i working in a very, very good environment. so at least it also makes me happy. i mean, how would this my 2nd whole slow so if i'm an individual, i also feel homesickness with the file from his homework. so i am home in indonesia and in home, but that's it for this edition of me looking

at germany's economic wireless and hope and vicious energy transition plans and the challenges involved in transporting solar power over seriously, long distance is fine till next time. the

holding up the sky because if it falls full people are in danger. this as well, that'd be confident with the leaves budget point to get it to be a team of budgets. and the do you feel feel cheap by any means necessary? so these people, the, and remind me in the amazon rain forest in 15 minutes dw. hi, i'm a 5 and i'm assuming, hello, i'm being calm, i'm of course,

i'm going to have an email. in indonesia, their love is considered tab. people here tend to hold deeply traditional views, especially about relationships. we talked a couple of funding for their loved. we are running. why are noble us in 90 minutes on d w, the you can draw the line between the space is because i don't believe that space is, is i'm hourly relevant criteria. and any more than i believe that rice or sex is on frontier in. 2 2 should. 2 2 humans are closer to a chimpanzee vanishing. pansy is even to a dog. but duck here, series about our complex relationship with animals. watch now on youtube dw

documentary. this city is hungry for the future. so i'm seeing in southwest china 32000000 people live here. many of them are young and under my parents wanted me to become a civil servant, but i didn't like the idea of getting such an old fashioned job and being stuff making money, having fun when nice pools. and so i'm seeing jobs december 30 its own d w. where is mohammed? i'm looking for my nephew. give me a decent meeting. we don't know what's going on. the sub off fled from northern iraq and he became one of hundreds of migrants who vanished every year. somewhere in no man's land, the lines between batteries. i'm clear, if you choose become pools in a cru, see a political country where,

oh you lost the run starts december 18th on dw, the business dw news life from the israel strikes military targets across the serious saying it's targeting weapon stuff, pots, spot based attacks, hundreds of people who left syria during the drink more, the more then decades of civil war have to come to return on. also on the prevent the united states top diplomat says he's consent of a resurgence of the so called just let me state and syria bar is the great could be trying to rebuild its capabilities that we take a look at taking his role in the fall of the syrian regime and how it benefits from the asked bush out of us. the.