It is hard to see how these giant EPR reactors – already blighted by the closure of Taishan 2 in China due to a design flaw – are ever going to compete with Saharan solar. Nor is big nuclear as versatile.

The grid had to pay Sizewell frightening sums to shut down power during the pandemic. “We can switch power on and off in a heartbeat,” said Mr Morrish.

The next generation IV wave of small modular reactors will be more flexible, quicker to build, and perhaps significantly cheaper. But it is a racing certainty that the Government’s plan for up to eight giant reactors of the old vintage – culminating in a 24 GW nuclear park by 2050 – will look ridiculous long before the ground is even cleared. In my view they will be dropped quietly.

Vladimir Putin has reminded everybody about the risks of energy blackmail, and so has Emmanuel Macron in his charming way by threatening to cut off the UK’s electricity interconnectors over Brexit.

No country is going to bet entirely on power cables beyond their control or that may be at risk of sabotage by submarines. Nor will any bet too heavily on any North African state within striking distance of ISIS cells in the Sahel, even though Morocco is a relative haven of stability, largely untouched by the turmoil of the Arab Spring.

The larger point is that we are being catapulted into a new energy order. It will be based on renewable power wherever it is cheapest on the planet, and produced at colossal scale for transcontinental demand. It will be exported either by electricity cable – surely the most efficient – or by hydrogen pipeline, or in the form of green ammonia shipped in tankers, much like crude oil or LNG gas today.

Australian tycoon Twiggy Forrest has just signed a deal with Germany’s E.on to supply up to five million tons a year of green ammonia by 2030 from a solar and wind domain in the Pilbara outback. This alone is equivalent to one third of Germany’s entire hydrocarbon imports from Russia, measured by calorific content.

It is just the start of Mr Forrest’s imperial dream for a 1,000 GW nexus of renewable power spanning the globe, though where he will find enough electrolysers to pull it off has yet to be answered.

CWP Global plans similar giant hubs in Patagonia and the Sahara, making clean ammonia for seaborn shipment. These are the biggest projects in the world, each akin to another North Sea of oil and gas. Ultimately, they will undercut and replace the Opec-Russia system. Nothing can compete with desert solar already testing $10 per megawatt hour.

You would hardly know that the Xlinks project existed if you followed the debate about the Government’s Energy Security Strategy earlier this month, a document that did an agonising split between big nuclear and big wind, like trying to straddle two horses galloping off at different angles.

The British energy debate is strangely insular at times. One wonders if the Government and the veteran policy experts – many of them – have grasped the elemental point that ultra-cheap and transferable energy from places they have never heard of is going to blow away the old regime. They seem to talk past the real world.

Xlinks will be our first taste of this new order, and it is coming very soon in historical energy time.