Renewable energy’s Nord Stream moment

Dear Reader,

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…

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What a week!

We’ve had a hard time keeping up. Bloomberg:

‘$1 Trillion Rout Hits Nasdaq 100 Over AI Jitters in Worst Day Since 2022

‘Investors soured on the promise of artificial intelligence Wednesday, sparking a $1 trillion rout in the Nasdaq 100 Index as questions swirled over just how long it will take for the substantial investments in the technology to pay off.

‘The Nasdaq indexes tumbled more than 3% for the worst days since October 2022. The list of laggards was a who’s-who of AI technology darlings, led by semiconductor companies such as Nvidia Corp., Broadcom Inc. and Arm Holdings Plc.’

Tom says he’s ‘getting a whiff of mood change’ in the markets. He highlighted the drop in the Nasdaq in his update yesterday:

‘Over the past two weeks, the Russell 2000 is up 8% while the Nasdaq 100 is down by 7%. Notables Nvidia fell 15%, AMD fell 30%, ASML fell 26%, Taiwan Semiconductor fell 16% and Micron Technology fell 19%.’

It reminds us of late 1999. Then it was ‘dot.com’ stocks that were headed ‘to the moon.’ And by early the next year, 2000, they got there. The Nasdaq doubled in a single year. Tech stocks were at their peaks... and beginning to wobble. Then, a year later, they had been cut in half.

Will the same thing happen to today’s leading techs? Maybe.

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