‘Renewable energy that acts like baseload power’: Plans unveiled for major Morocco-UK clean power link
Start-up Xlinks claims plans to lay 3,800km interconnector route between Morocco and Devon could cover eight per cent of Britain’s power needs by 2030
A significant proportion of UK homes could soon be powered by energy captured by solar panels and wind turbines installed in the Moroccan desert, under plans unveiled yesterday by UK clean energy infrastructure startup Xlinks.
The clean energy venture – which developers have touted as the ‘first of its kind’ – would see power captured at a solar, wind and battery storage plant in the Guelmim Oued Noun region of Morocco, and then transmitted to the UK through subsea cables.
Xlinks claims the £16bn project would provide “renewable energy that acts like baseload power” to the UK, noting the Saharan plant would benefit from Morocco’s long hours of sun and exposure to convection trade winds which blow east to west just north and south of the equator.
To deliver a near-constant source of flexible power, the plant would store the energy it produces at an onsite 20GWh/5GW battery storage facility, Xlinks explained.
The company estimates that power generated at the plant would be capable of covering eight per cent of Great Britain’s electricity needs, calculating the hybrid power station would be capable of delivering 3.6GW of reliable energy for more than 20 hours every day. That amounts to roughly the amount of energy required by seven million homes by 2030, it said.
Xlinks plans to connect the Moroccan plant directly to Britain’s electricity grid via four undersea High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) cables. The 3,800km interconnector route would be laid in waters skirting the coasts of Portugal, Spain and France before linking to UK via two 1.8GW connections at Alverdiscott in Devon.
The news comes as the UK government faces mounting pressure to explain how it will shore up the UK’s supplies of energy and reduce its reliance on fossil fuels for electricity, with the country currently facing a fuel shortage that has led to record energy bills for millions of households across the UK.
Reacting to the announcement on Twitter, influential clean energy analyst Michael Liebreich described Xlinks’ announcement as “the big energy news of the day”.
This is the big energy news of the day – not the fact that UK motorists have managed to empty petrol stations in one of their periodic bouts of panic buying, egged on by our hyperactive and entirely energy-illiterate media. https://t.co/XYGPb3YsqM
— Michael Liebreich (@MLiebreich) September 26, 2021
