OK, 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 XLinks – the now cancelled green energy power project was. In what was supposed to be a triumph of engineering and climate ambition, the Xlinks 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 twenty-four 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 Greenpeace 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 locally.

Unfortunately, the XLinks project has joined a growing graveyard of planned megaprojects that are grand in vision, 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.

XLinks 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 twenty-five years – so while not officially subsidized – this was a type of subsidy and the project won’t be going ahead without it.

That price? £70 to £80 pounds per megawatt 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 is about three 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’ve meant billions of pounds in government price guarantees over the next twenty-five years.

So, let’s talk about transmission losses next. High Voltage Direct Current or HVDC cables lose about 3.5% of their power per thousand 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 a quarter 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 Xlinks.

The project’s estimated cost jumped from £20 billion to £24 billion pounds 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 fifty 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 Commonsense Sceptic 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.

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 a lack of domestic economic benefit. He expressed a preference for 'homegrown renewables’ - Translation: 'We’d rather build wind farms in Yorkshire than run a 4,000 km extension cord to Africa.'

Xlinks is unfortunately not an outlier—it’s part of a bigger pattern. The UK’s infrastructure ambitions are littered with projects that start with fanfare and end in farce. HS2, the high-speed rail line meant to connect London to the North, saw its northern leg scrapped after costs ballooned past £100 billion pounds. Along the way, it spent £119 million pounds on a special tunnel to preserve a protected bat colony—despite there being no evidence that high-speed trains interfere with bats.

Then there’s Hinkley Point C, the nuclear plant in Somerset, now expected to cost £46 billion pounds. Among its more surprising features: a 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 diver safety and questionable effectiveness, but environmental campaigners pushed back. The fish disco may have to go ahead.

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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 overpromises, underdelivers, and gets bogged down in a tangle of regulation, litigation, and political risk aversion. As the Danish economist Bent Flyvbjerg has noted, megaprojects are “almost always over budget, over time, 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 nine out of ten 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 few things more than the visibility they get from announcing a new megaproject.

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 megaprojects 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 Ardnacrusha 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 is described as a beer and biscuits economy, where the only real industry in the country was Guinnesses 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 Ardnacrusha - 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 Poulaphouca 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 benefitted most of the population and dragged the country into the modern world when today it is impossible to build enough housing for the population or even a new road?

McWilliams argues in his podcast that Western societies have today become victims of “hyperdemocracy”—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 Hinkley 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 four times more expensive per megawatt 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? 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. The UK’s nuclear regulator required 7,000 design changes to EDF’s already-approved reactor. The changes required 25% more concrete, 35% more steel, and a reactor so bespoke it’s now known as the “UK EPR”—a 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 been built already, 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 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. 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 is 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 dollars which adjusted for inflation is about the same as New York’s one-and-a-half-mile extension of the 7 subway to Hudson Yard cost.

The paradox is this: the more we care about doing things right—environmentally, socially, politically, the less we seem 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 Xlinks are a symptom 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 upgrades, domestic renewables, interconnectors with redundancy, and public transport built to cost—not to impress.

Madrid’s metro, Singapore’s grid strategy, and Ireland’s Turlough Hill pumped-storage plant are all examples of infrastructure that works because it was designed with delivery in mind and where the key is speed, simplicity, and replicability—not scale and spectacle.

One of the most underappreciated risks of the Xlinks 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, Xlinks begins to look less like a resilient energy solution and more like a fragile lifeline waiting to be severed.

The likelihood of the Xlinks project coming in on budget was extremely low, based on the various risk factors and on historical precedent.

First, the project had already experienced significant cost escalation before construction even began. Initial estimates of £16 billion pounds - ballooned to twenty billion pounds and then £24 billion—a 50% increase—mirroring the trajectory of other UK megaprojects like HS2 and Hinkley Point C.

Second, the scale and complexity of Xlinks were unprecedented. The 22.5 GWh battery array would have been 16 times larger than the world’s largest completed battery system, requiring over 5,700 Battery Megapacks and occupying around 50 square miles. The four-thousand-kilometer 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 cable’s route through international waters raised concerns about sabotage and jurisdictional disputes. The UK government ultimately cited security concerns and the lack of domestic supply chain benefits as reasons for withdrawing support.

Fourth, historical precedent suggests that megaprojects 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 Sceptic 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, Xlinks 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 Xlinks. We need to remember how to build.

If you found this interesting, you should watch my video on the dumbest megaprojects next. Don’t forget to check out our sponsor DeleteMe using the link in the description. Have a great day and talk to you in the next video – bye.