Good news, everyone. Australian sunshine is set to power Singapore after all. The 2671-mile subsea power cable connecting the two is approved. It’ll be the world’s longest. At least, it could be…
In fact, the internet is full of projects promising they’ll be ‘the longest subsea cable’ one day. Power transmission across the oceans is big business these days. A bit like Nord Stream 2 was once. Before it got blown up…
But wasn’t the SunCable project abandoned only just last year?
Well, SunCable went into administration. The former leaders went into a carbon sucking venture called Fugu instead. But the SunCable venture is now backed by billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes’ Grok Ventures.
A very merry go round this climate change business, isn’t it? Entrepreneurs shuffle from one imaginary project to another.
But I reckon the cable business is the biggest boondoggle yet. It’s not just Nemo who will be getting lost in a maze of electrical cables. Two weeks ago, we considered what a renewable energy grid would look like. The headline was a bit of a giveaway: Enough Power Lines to Cover the Earth Like a Skin Disease.
But the environmentalists are not satisfied with defacing the surface of our planet in the name of renewables. Nor digging up our subterranean environment with their mind bogglingly large mines. They want to go subsea too.
There’s just one big problem I’d like to point out. You might even remember what it is…
Who’s going to cut the ribbon on this one?
Back in 2018, then President Trump warned Germany of energy dependence on Russia. Nord Stream 2 was a geopolitical mistake, he said. And he was ridiculed by the audience – the United Nations.
But just three years later, the Germans came knocking for American gas at any price. Russia had invaded Ukraine. And then the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline got blown up by…we still don’t know who.
And so the Germans had to pay up, big time. They spent almost as much on energy crisis policies as the pandemic!
It was a big enough opportunity to knock even President Biden out of his green dream delusions. He sold the Europeans the gas they needed. And turned America into a gas exporting superpower.
My question is whether the Western world might be making much the same mistake again with renewables. In a surprisingly similar way, too.
You could call it a “submarine energy war”, because that makes it sound exciting.
Renewable energy systems rely on vulnerable sub-sea power cables
The energy transition requires enough high voltage cables to make an AC/DC tribute band nervous. Interconnectors between countries and different parts of countries. Not to mention connecting offshore wind farms.
These are often submarine cables to avoid using up scenic land, just as Nord Stream 2 was submerged to avoid Ukraine.
My worry is obvious, right? If we are transitioning to an energy system that relies on subsea cables, are we making the same mistake as the Germans were with Nord Stream 2 in 2018?
This is of course terribly conspiratorial. Nord Stream 2 was just an exception. It’s not like submarine cables are being clandestinely cut around the world.
Well, funny you should mention that…
In 2022, High North News reported this:
‘The sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea earlier this week may shed new light on two recent incidents in the Norwegian Arctic involving the cutting of communication cables.’
BBC News in March:
‘Several undersea communications cables in the Red Sea have been cut, affecting 25% of data traffic flowing between Asia and Europe, a telecoms company and a US official say.’
Bloomberg has published a new long-winded piece of mystery journalism about a ‘12-ton section of cable’ that went ‘missing’ off the coast of Norway. It took them ages to figure out what had gone wrong, because checking in on a sub-sea cable is mighty expensive and difficult, even for the Norwegians.
The snip list goes on. Mostly, it’s telecoms cables that get cut. The Internet Society Pulse: ‘According to the United Nations, 150 to 200 subsea cable faults occur annually. Fishing and shipping activities account for nearly two-thirds of the total’.
The thing is, some of the cable cutting incidents involve Russian fishing vessels that don’t seem interested in fish…
It’s enough to make Bloomberg ask, ‘Is Russia Waging War Under the Seas?’ in a new video. Apparently, analysts allege ‘a wider pattern of Russian sabotage’.
Why the Russians would sabotage their ability to interfere in other people’s elections is a mystery. Why they would want to sabotage their geopolitical enemies’ electricity systems is not.
Why we would give them such an easy target is the real question we need to ask ourselves. And Singapore might want to hurry up. Or they’ll discover their clean green power source is really just a way for someone to pull the plug on their entire country without getting caught…
Don’t worry, though. It’s not like SunCable will pass through the Strait of Malacca, where around 94,000 ships pass through every year carrying around 30% of all traded goods globally. Good luck spotting your saboteur in that.
If someone can get away with damaging Nord Stream 2, I’m guessing they can get away with damaging subsea power cables. And if this seems to happen all the time without mysteries being solved, I suspect they can get away with it twice over.
Energy security has many meanings
The issue here is the same one we’ve been highlighting for years now. And in all sorts of different ways.
The energy infrastructure needed to make renewables look viable undermines their viability. You can now add energy security, in the geopolitical sense, to the long list.
In a way, all this is really just a business opportunity. Fixing and inspecting subsea cables is very expensive.
My old friend Callum Newman knows how to find the stocks that could benefit from this sort of opportunity. He’s found exciting opportunities to benefit in a similar trade already. It featured an airborne threat instead of a subsea one. But the nature of the threat was the same.
Find out what he’s focusing on now, here.
Until next time,
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Nick Hubble,
Editor, Strategic Intelligence Australia
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