World Spending on Grid Infrastructure Will Have to Rival Solar and Wind Power

The world's move to renewable electricity will only happen with hundreds of billions of dollars spent on grid infrastructure

Elektra, a 240-meter long specially built boring machine weighing more than 1,000 tons, will pierce through the city's rock of granite and gneiss to build a tunnel for new power cables needed to meet soaring demand.

Will Mathis and

Akshat Rathi

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If you assessed the future of energy based on how it's depicted in images — rows of solar panels, fields with wind turbines, big blocks of batteries — you could be forgiven for forgetting about all the cables.

But it would be a big omission, because cables are the backbone of the electric grid. In many cases, building a grid that can take on all those renewables can be more expensive than the cost of the solar and wind farms themselves.