It’s been talked about for ages and laughed off too, it’s sunny down there cold up here let’s move the power from deserts to drizzly Britain. But could the idea of a ‘global grid’ where places with lots of sun and wind can transport their generated excess to nations that need it, now be a reality?
James works for a company planning to do this within five years, called Xlinks. Their Morocco-UK Power Project is a proposal to create 11.5 GW of renewable generation, 22.5 GWh of battery storage and a 3.6 GW high-voltage direct current interconnector to carry solar and wind-generated electricity from Morocco to the United Kingdom.
If built, the 4,000 km (2,500 miles) cable will be the world’s longest undersea power cable – and would supply up to 8% of the UK’s electricity consumption
He said: “We think the global grids make so much sense, you know, to move the electrons in time and space and wind as well. But you know, one of the fundamental maybe misconceptions and why people thought that the global grid was a crazy idea a decade ago is, actually because the long distance cables are now possible.
“They’ve been proven, you know, especially in the UK where you have them in the form of kind of interconnectors, which connect from us to Norway to Denmark, other parts of Europe. So that’s really been proven and that’s what allows us to embark on, if you like, the next frontier to really do it, you know, intercontinental and long distance.”
Xlinks has been raising funding and doing surveys to see how the cable will be laid as it charts a course from off the coast of Morocco up around coasts of Spain, Portugal and France before coming into southern England.
The scale is massive – a solar farm with 15 million panels and a wind farm with 600 turbines, in a rocky desert 100 miles inland from the coast of Morocco. The site will have battery storage and cables which run to the coast and then take the power to the UK. The sun is obvious but the wind? Don’t we have enough of that off the British coast?
James said it’s all about reliable energy.
“The winds are trade winds. Much more consistent because it’s not linked to the landmass cooling down. So if you’ve ever been on holiday in a hot country, perhaps you know, the wind picks up in the evenings. That’s basically, the effect here.
“So, you know, in essence, you have a very reliable solar, including in the winter, because it’s that much further south.
“Coupled with this wind, which is not, correlated to the northern European wind and is very steady and consistent – and that plus the batteries is what allows us to give a very firm profile, you know, 19 hours (of power) a day.”
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