Welcome to Business Daily. I'm Justin Rowlatt. I know making electricity grids more efficient doesn't sound very interesting, but try living in California, which has been living with rolling blackouts recently and giving renewable energy a bad name.

See, this is what happens when you use wind and solar. The lights go out.

But there is a solution at hand, and it could involve building a gigantic electricity grid spanning the North Pole.

Santa's workshop turns into this massive switching point with high voltage transmission lines running down into North America and Europe and Eastern Russia and China.

So a worldwide grid to complement the World Wide Web, here on Business Daily from the BBC

World Service.

Now there's a long story about high voltage direct current, which involves Thomas Edison,

Nikola Tesla and electrocuted elephants. Mike Barnard runs an energy consultancy based in Vancouver, Canada,

called The Future is Electric. Here's the short version of that electric anecdote.

All of our devices, like laptops and those are all direct current devices internally, but they're all plugged into the wall and out of the wall comes alternating current.

So alternating current, what you're really seeing is a complete reversal of flow every 60th of a second.

Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip.

When you flip the current running through a wire,

you create a magnetic field and you create the opportunity to electrocute somebody. Now, Thomas

Elva Edison and Nikola Tesla were great early electrical competitors. And Thomas Edison favored

direct current. Tesla favored alternating current.

And one of the demonstrations that Edison did is he put a bunch of animals on a plate

and ran alternating current through it and electrocuted them to death.

Demonstrating how dangerous Tesla's innovation was, yeah?

Yes.

Now, of course, that failed, but Edison being Edison, he won anyway.

Tesla died in relative poverty.

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