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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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Meanwhile the Germans are planning to run a cable from Morocco for that sweet sweet solar power.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/britain-risks-losing-germany-16bn-155135780.html

Not really what your article shows, which doesn't actually indicate a German government role. Rather, it's a threat by the company that wants to be paid to build the project in order to pressure the UK to provide more money, with the threat to build to Germany instead. However, the article doesn't claim that Germany is interested in this, and the underlying context is that the company (XLinks) is in the capital/financing accumulation phase (trying to identify investor governments), of which the UK was the primary interested investor.

Xlinks garnered initial UK interest, in the 'UK is sending civil servants to study this in depth if it actually makes sense' sort, because it claimed the project would be profitable for it if it was guaranteed a solar energy cost floor (minimal price) of 48 pounds per MegaWatt Hour (GBP/MWh), when the UK cost is generally higher. The route was intended to be a shallow-water cable basically bypassing Spain to go direct to the UK, meaning it wasn't to enter the EU energy market (which would risk/compromise the viability of the project for the UK for multiple reasons).

But that's kind of where the project has stalled. It's unclear if the UK found other information indicating it's not viable, whether the costs are higher than initially advertised, or what. But implicitly the project is under negotiation. And this article isn't the Germans saying they want in, but rather the company involved threatening to go ask the Germans to see if they want to replace the UK as the recipient... but naturally if the UK isn't delivered to, it's not going to be a load-carrying investor, and as for the Germans...

Well, there are a couple problems for that. One being that it have to enter the European energy grid, unlike the sea transmission route to the UK, and the French have typically opposed solar transmission network proposals (such as from Spain) linking solar producers to their consumers... surely unrelated to France's own substantial electricity exports to Germany, and its desire to expand its nuclear energy exports to its European neighbors.

But there's also the point that the Xlinks Morocco project started being pushed in 2021, and the Ukraine War kicked off in 2022. Germany energy policy since has been about (re)building natural gas import capacity, as natural gas is not only critical for stable baseload power generation, but specifically as an input for many of Germany's industrial processes as a resoruce separate from the electricity. As a result, Germany's energy investment priority has been on scaling up its import capacity / storage for gas as it fights to keep as much industrial capacity as it can.