A grandiose new project of huge importance to the UK and Morocco, but also globally as a technological first, has been approved by the UK government as a project of national strategic importance, guaranteeing its implementation by bypassing the local approvals and lengthy bureaucratic procedures that such a project would normally have to go through. The new project, developed by Xlinks, is called the Morroco-UK Power Project and will see renewable energy produced in the Sahara and transported to the UK by direct sea cables, bringing the energy benefits of a sunny area to a rainy, sunless one for the first time in the world.
The Xlinks have a global planet-wide vision for such ideas and want to get to a stage where the whole planet would be interconnected by powerful cables, with huge solar power generation parks all around the equator. The sun never sets over the whole planet at once, so about half the planet would always be producing energy from solar sources, delivering it for the benefit of all. If we ended up with such an interconnected system across the planet, with large reserves of power to cover all the intermittencies of weather and seasons, then we wouldn’t really need large batteries to store renewable energy across the country, because we simply give the surplus to others at midday and then take it back from others when we need it.
Sounds like a brilliant idea, which can only work when the whole planet is united in such a drive. Until that could materialize, Xlinks have been trying to convince the British and Moroccan governments to develop and implement a first phase of such a project that would really work and bring huge benefits to both countries. Morocco has transformed itself in recent years from a major electricity importer into a growing exporter thanks to its huge, ever-expanding mirror solar power plants. And since the Xlinks project involves building new renewable energy capacity in Morocco, employing thousands of people, and delivering this renewable energy to the UK, helping the latter meet its electricity demand for the transition to electric cars and a CO2-neutral economy in general, the project has been approved by both governments. And now, from the approval of the idea in principle, it has moved on to being classified as a strategic project of national importance, which allows it to go straight to quick and final approvals and design, construction and implementation, with clear terms.
The project involves the construction of solar and wind power generation capacities in the Guelmim-Oued Noun region of Morocco, with a huge installed capacity of 10.5 GW in total! For comparison, the most powerful nuclear reactor in Europe, Olkiluoto 3, inaugurated in April this year in Finland, has 1.6 GW of power. So 10.5 GW is 6.5 times more!
But of course, speaking of solar and wind, there are intermittencies, so the final yield is lower. However, the concept of the new project assumes that it will also have batteries totaling 20 GWh of storage capacity, with 5 GW of power delivered to the grid from the batteries alone, which means that at full power they can still provide 4 hours of electricity, even during late evening or night. Solar energy will be produced by photovoltaic panels that track the angle of the sun throughout the day for higher efficiency.
The two renewable energy sources, solar and wind, in the Sahara, with the battery power plant next door, will be spread across 1,500 square kilometers of desert and will provide Britain with an average of 3.6 GW of power, averaged over 20 hours a day. Basically, energy will not be supplied only at night and in the morning, when consumption is minimal. Day and evening it will provide virtually constant supply, thanks to the batteries there is also the possibility to cover evening peaks. An elementary calculation shows that 3.6 GW of power averaged over an average of 20 hours a day means 72 GWh of electricity delivered every day to the UK from Morocco. On a year level, that is. That’s 26.28 TWh of electricity, more than half of Romania’s annual consumption and 6 times more than Moldova’s annual consumption.
This project alone will provide the UK with 8% of the electricity it will need in 2030, with all the expected increases from electric cars. The project is due to become fully operational in 2029, with the sea cables laid. And the cables will stretch 3,800 km from the west coast of Morocco to the UK, past Portugal, Spain and France, making it the world’s longest maritime power cable! The wiring group will consist of 4 units, separately drawn for redundancy.
The project authors say the solar panels generate 3 times more electricity in Morocco over 24 hours than they would in the UK, thanks to the angle of the sun and sunnier days. From January to March, the same panels produce 5 times more electricity in Morocco than in the UK, so generating electricity where it is most productive and transporting it to other regions is something that increases the efficiency of renewable energy production.
For Morocco, this project will mean 10 thousand jobs during the construction phase, then 2 thousand permanent jobs, and a huge volume of exported energy. The project is estimated to cost £20 billion.
