Okay, imagine this. You're in the UK, it's grey and raining as usual, and someone

pitches you the idea to run a 4,000 kilometre 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 a 50 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 the UK's electricity at a cost of 24 billion pounds. 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 Green

Peace saying that it was just another case of the global North exploiting the global

South 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 mega-projects

that are grand envision, bloated in cost and ultimately undone by their own complexity.

From high-speed rail lines that never reach 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,

...