Do you know that whilst driving at a speed of 62mph/100kmh, one would need about 36 hours of consistent driving with no stops to effectively cover the distance. Now imagine an undersea cable constructed from the ground up that is expected to cover this distance with the objective of exporting desert solar power to Europe. In the face of steep hurdles and bottlenecks, why won’t this vision go away? 

The journey of the vision moving from bold ambition to real achievement and beyond

The responses to the exploration of the potential of solar and wind in North Africa, which can supply up to the European power requirements, have been long-planned. In the early 2010s, the earliest ideas were to use solar farms as a web system in deserts to provide power throughout the Mediterranean.

The Morocco-UK Power Project by Xlinks is one of the most ambitious renewable energy ideas that is being formed. It proposes the construction of a giant 11,500 MW solar and wind project in Morocco with a large battery storage system attached and interconnecting it with the UK by almost 4,000 km of undersea HVDC cables. When implemented, it would mark a breakthrough project in the two countries that would be linked using clean energy.

At full-scale, it would be able to supply 7 million British households and serve approximately 8 per cent of the British electricity demand by eliminating dependence on fossil fuels and enhancing security.

Why it isn’t easy with the technical, economic, and political barriers faced by this project?

Great obstacles lie in the way of such an undersea super-highway. Technically, ULTRA-long HVDC undersea submarine cables are still innovative: long-haul loss, low-cost in relation to offshore life, geography of the seabed, cable routings, maintenance, and repair all present a risk and cost.

The size and the cost of capital are colossal in economic terms. In the case of the Morocco-UK undersea project, they ran in tens of billions of pounds. TAQA, TotalEnergies, and Octopus Energy donated some funding, but the project simply did not make sense without long-term price guarantees, which is why Contracts for Difference were important. Otherwise, the risk of investment is great. The fact that the energy infrastructure across borders requires the support of national regulation and environmental lines. 

The reasons the vision still persists and the forces that sustain it

Costs and performance are increasingly becoming lower and better, courtesy of technical advancements. With the current HVDC undersea cable development, battery storage, solar, and wind efficiencies, it becomes possible to consider projects like this that, before this time, might have been viewed as uninspiring.

With the recent crisis of energy change, Europe also has high decarbonization aims. With the climate crisis, unstable gas markets, and unstable geopolitical situations in fossil fuel sourcing, the case of generating where renewable potential is high, ship to where demand is compelling, just like Japan’s solar sphere powering U.S homes.

The geographic and comparative advantages of this project that set it apart

Areas such as the deserts of southern Morocco provide more rigorous, more dependable solar radiance; evenings or terrible winds augment sunlight; nearby land might not be as disputed as in more populated areas. Clean energy is not only a benefit to the environment when it is exported, but it also has economic and strategic implications in the Sun Belt countries. 

There is still a lot of uncertainty around this undersea project, but there is no doubt about the immense benefits that the project is about to exude. The terrain itself seems entirely perilous; in fact, in this scenario, funding does not even seem to be the major issue, but stable policies, international cooperation, and risk sharing. Even if the dream will not exactly match early designs, the concept itself shows an unyielding depth of innovation and creativity, just like this groundbreaking giant star.