Britain Shuns $34 Billion Morocco-UK Subsea Power Project (reuters.com) 66
The UK government has rejected the 25 billion ($34.39 billion) pound Morocco-UK Power Project, citing a preference for domestic renewable initiatives that offer greater economic and strategic benefits. The project aimed to supply solar and wind energy from the Sahara to power up to seven million UK homes. Reuters reports: "The government has concluded that it is not in the UK national interest at this time to continue further consideration of support for the Morocco-UK Power Project," energy department minister Michael Shanks said in a written statement to parliament. He also said the project did not clearly align strategically with the government's mission to build homegrown power in the UK.
Xlinks' Morocco-UK power project would have tapped Moroccan renewable energy via what would have been the world's longest subsea power cable. The plan involved building 3,800 kilometers (2,361 miles) of high-voltage direct current subsea cables from Morocco to southwest England. The company had been seeking a guaranteed minimum price for the electricity supplied, known as contract for difference, from Britain's government.
Xlinks' Morocco-UK power project would have tapped Moroccan renewable energy via what would have been the world's longest subsea power cable. The plan involved building 3,800 kilometers (2,361 miles) of high-voltage direct current subsea cables from Morocco to southwest England. The company had been seeking a guaranteed minimum price for the electricity supplied, known as contract for difference, from Britain's government.
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We dont need to import them. They make their own way here and usually are delivered by the French Navy
Re:I am surprised... (Score:4, Interesting)
Usually the UK likes having its balls rudely and roughly handled by people from foreign lands.
Of which this is a perfect example. Renewable energy is 100% strategic for the UK and is something which the UK needs to build up in order to have the cheap energy which will give us the chance of keeping more manufacturing. Ordinarily I'd disagree with this decision big time, however adding 3,800 KM to the undersea cables that have to be guarded against Russian interference sounds unwise at this particular time. This decision is clearly being driven both by Russian threats to underseas infrastructure and by overseas trolling campaigns which make government more reluctant to invest riskily in renewables.
In the meantime, China is able to keep investing vastly in renewable energy and soon will have an almost unassailable lead in cheaper energy from it. That's despite their geography being much worse than the UK for doing it in.
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The UK is wasting huge amounts of money on a couple of nuclear reactors that aren't needed and which only supply extremely expensive electricity. If the investment was going into renewables at the rate it should be going in I'd be okay with this decision, but it seems more likely that it wan cancelled to divert funds to these nuclear projects.
We could have been world leaders in renewables, particularly offshore wind. I think we have already missed that boat though, with other European countries, and of cour
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I think we have already missed that boat though, with other European countries, and of course China, surging ahead.
Serious question: Is there a boat to be missed with solar and wind? That is, given that China is ahead and pulling further ahead, does that relative success present any roadblocks for other countries to do the same? China does have industries that manufacture and support solar and wind, but same question there, is there an impediment to other countries ramping up in manufacturing and support? Are the current reasons for China's current strength intrinsic or more a matter of relative national will?
For ex
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I think the answer is broadly that China being ahead doesn’t push the UK further back. The most obvious potential bottleneck would be supply chain, but China is still exporting a lot of solar panels, and capacity ramp-up is likely to mean that certainly for the UK, it could meet its demand even if it massively spiked its demand. Pakistan alone has put in tens of GW of solar in the last year or two, using Chinese panels.
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There's also an argument to be made that if the R&D aspects of developing both solar and wind power are somewhat open, in the sense that one's domestic materials science and manufacturing and fairly easily make domestic examples of just about every technical development that comes out of another country. An argument that it actually makes sense to let someone else go through the painful and expensive R&D to find the dead-ends, the problems, the hangups, and to then implement starting at a particula
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Obviously the wind will keep blowing around the UK so we won't miss out on being able to harvest it, but the technology is racing ahead. That means patents, it means all the low hanging fruit is taken and R&D will have less of a return, and it gives them time to ramp up mass production and reduce costs before we have barely started.
China's and Germany's usual strengths are suited to wind turbines too. China produces massive amounts of steel, the supply chain is extremely agile, and they have the experie
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For example, if the UK or the US decided to be serious about solar and wind, could they scale up quickly or are there intrinsic impediments, like technology, natural resources, insurmountable supply chain issues, etc.?
Nuclear fission is a very concentrated source of power which means it doesn't require near the same amount of raw material for the same power output and total energy produced over decades. We have nuclear power plants built 50 years ago undergoing refurbishment to last another 30 years, that means 80 years of operation for that original investment of cement, steel, copper, etc. New reactors would certainly have similar operational lifespans, if not lasting 100+ years like we expect from a hydroelectric da
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We could have been world leaders in renewables, particularly offshore wind.
Offshore wind costs more than nuclear. If you disagree then prove me wrong. Here's a source for my claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I've seen cost estimates for nuclear power in the USA based on a sample size of one, Plant Vogtle, which is hardly the basis to estimate costs for an entire industry. Same for the UK, estimates on new nuclear power plant construction is often based on the single example at Hinkley Point. If people don't want to look like an ignoramus, shill, or hack then they should
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Re: I am surprised... (Score:2)
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China is certainly investing in renewables big time, but mostly that's out of desperation so that they can reduce their dependence on imported oil from the middle east, which they know they can't provide effective security for.
There are a lot of headwinds for China. For starters they have poor geography. Their demographics are very bad. International investment is drying up. If anything they're over-investing in solar, with huge plants being built up in the northwest areas where they don't have industry
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The logic offered for this extremely long undersea cable, instead of copying the Spain-Morocco interconnection that already exists, is to avoid having to deal with the politics and permits of other nations. Perhaps doing some work on establishing a trans-national coalition to allow an overland route and a short undersea cable following existing service routes would make more economic sense in addition to superior technical sense. The attempt to avoid contact with Spain and France with the 3800 km undersea r
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Usually the UK likes having its balls rudely and roughly handled by people from foreign lands.
Of which this is a perfect example. Renewable energy is 100% strategic for the UK and is something which the UK needs to build up in order to have the cheap energy which will give us the chance of keeping more manufacturing. Ordinarily I'd disagree with this decision big time, however adding 3,800 KM to the undersea cables that have to be guarded against Russian interference sounds unwise at this particular time. This decision is clearly being driven both by Russian threats to underseas infrastructure and by overseas trolling campaigns which make government more reluctant to invest riskily in renewables.
In the meantime, China is able to keep investing vastly in renewable energy and soon will have an almost unassailable lead in cheaper energy from it. That's despite their geography being much worse than the UK for doing it in.
The UK needs to work on having more of it's domestic energy needs met by domestic production. We've an absolute wealth of renewable with wind alone, backed up by biomass (not CO2 neutral but quite renewable) solar and hydro. With base loads being supported by nuclear we can work on reducing our dependence on oil and gas..
Morocco is 2,200 miles from the UK, running a cable from Cancun, Mexico to Portland, Maine would be shorter.
It would be utterly daft to choose to do this.
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In the meantime, China is able to keep investing vastly in renewable energy and soon will have an almost unassailable lead in cheaper energy from it.
China also has 30+ nuclear power reactors under construction right now. Source: https://world-nuclear.org/info... [world-nuclear.org]
That's despite their geography being much worse than the UK for doing it in.
Hardly the case.
China has wide expanses of low population density land to allow them to put up windmills and solar power facilities (PV and thermal) without having to be concerned about displacing people. Of course as a dictatorial nation they have little concern on needing to convince people to move if they are in the way but there is still a cost to moving those people and tearing down hous
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Deserve Funny and the story got none. And I think we all need more funny these weeks...
Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Brit, pro-Europe and anti-Brexit, who is quite into my solar...
I think this is a good idea. The money is better spent elsewhere and it's increasingly proven risky to rely on things running across ocean floors. To our nearest neighbours across the channel, we're probably okay, we can monitor that stretch easily enough and none of it is international waters.
But round to Morocco? That's just a nightmare of a project to even start and keeping that cable safe for decades to come? Seems unlikely.
For that price we can build nuclear sites, or HUGE solar or wind farms and just solve the problem ourselves, or more interconnects to closer countries (but I don't think we're at capacity in that regard anyway).
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The funny thing is for a moment my brain switched France and Morocco (or Britain and Spain) because in my mind, only with that kind of proximity would such a project ever have made sense.
When I read your post, I had a short reboot and my mind went "How crazy do you have to be to even consider this?"
Frankly, I think the most important thing we all want first and foremost is a grid that does not suck. And since that is a much tougher proposition than the question of where we get our power from to begin with..
Re:Yep (Score:5, Interesting)
The funny thing is for a moment my brain switched France and Morocco (or Britain and Spain) because in my mind, only with that kind of proximity would such a project ever have made sense.
When I read your post, I had a short reboot and my mind went "How crazy do you have to be to even consider this?"
This actually does make sense to a large degree, with some Brexit stupidity included. The thing is that, almost any time that the North of Scotland is experiencing reduced wind generation, Morocco will be having the prevailing winds and will be generating a surplus, so getting Electricity from Morocco to the UK fixes huge amounts of energy imbalance and reduces your very expensive storage or thermal power needs vastly.
North-South electricity transmission in Europe overall is seriously lacking. That's a problem that extends all the way to Germany from Morocco. Brexit put the UK outside the European single market for electricity and so less of a priority for French and Spanish interconnect building. Having this direct connection would have bypassed that problem and helped balancing things lots.
Frankly, I think the most important thing we all want first and foremost is a grid that does not suck. And since that is a much tougher proposition than the question of where we get our power from to begin with... I think everyone and their donkey having solar with battery buffer is the way to go.
Rooftop solar is quite expensive, at least as a home add on, but recently some progress with the idea that newbuilds should come automatically with solar might help.
Even if we plop down ten nukes tomorrow and generate ten times the solar too, the lines are still crap and the renewables will still have the potential to bugger the grid.
Wind power is very much what stabilizes the grid from the problems of power systems like nuclear which aren't able to adjust quickly enough as demand changes throughout the day. Wind power is very much able to stop and start in seconds (in fact milliseconds, due to the inverters they use) That's why you often see wind turbines in the UK not running, despite the fact that the electricity they generate is already paid for. It's cheaper to pay them to stop generating than it would be to either turn down a nuclear plant or to pay for the extra storage needed so that nuclear could be used effectively.
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The general principle of time-shifting solar PV across time zones (and geographically moving wind power output across weather systems) makes so much sense that humans will probably fail to get it done because we seem to be erring on the side of parochialism, xenophobia, and collective stupidity these days.
My cynicism is borne of long experience wit
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Indeed, on top of that, you do not want to be dependent on another country for a substantial part of your electricity. The way politics are going, it is getting sexy to coerce and force things to get what you want. It would give a foreign country a bit of leverage. "UK, drive on the right side of the road or we revoke the environmental permit of your little solar array".
The UK is a major exporter of renewable energy and has lots of potential to be much more important for this. It's something where the UK really should be the one driving interconnection rather than the other way. Fortunately there already is huge inter-connectivity which mostly goes over the shortest possible link, directly to France through the channel.
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They'd be better off connecting a power line from morocco to gibraltar and spain.
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That already exists and more are being built but it doesn't solve the problem that the capacity from Spain to the UK is limited and hard to build. This would have bypassed that.
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I have great difficulty believing that it is harder and more expensive to build a power transmission line on land in Spain and France than undersea.
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I suspect it's an issue of sovereign funding. The UK is spending money, Spain and France are not. France isn't complaining about needing more capacity in its interconnect to Spain. Having a 3rd country (especially one that explicitly didn't want anything to do with the EU) come in with their wishes is a political shitshow.
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But round to Morocco? That's just a nightmare of a project to even start and keeping that cable safe for decades to come? Seems unlikely.
I expect recent events like a Chinese cargo ship "mysteriously" losing an anchor at sea about the time some undersea cables were damaged likely made UK rethink this cable to Morocco.
Another issue I heard against this project were accusations of "colonizing" Morocco. The claim was this would be a repeat of past sins of Britons going to places in Africa to exploit natural resources without proper compensation, that by buying electrical power from Morocco that leaves natives there somehow lacking in electrica
Re:Yep (Score:5, Informative)
Windmills at sea would be at as much risk to attack as any undersea cable, in part because there would be undersea cables to bring the wind power to shore where it can be used.
Please stop making up misinformation just because you think it might be useful for the nuclear industry. Windmills at sea have multiple, much shorter cable connections directly to the UK through UK territorial waters which means that a) attacking a cable causes less damage b) any submarine doing it are much more vulnerable to discovery and attack c) a submarine doing this can legitimately be interdicted without needing proof they are carrying out an attack.
Let's hope that such attacks are attempted because that will give a chance to deal with the problem in a way it can't be dealt with for even more strategic international communication cables.
Re:Yep (Score:4, Interesting)
Plus, the more the cables UK has towards offshore wind (and other countries), the more resilient UK becomes to potential cable dragging attacks. Total war is a different story and we're far from there. Assuming we have witnessed covert attacks in the Baltic to create a costly annoyance... An adversary cannot attack 20 undersea cables and keep the headlines "mysterious attacks". Maybe three can be damaged until surveillance is upgraded, like we have seen in the Baltic. The more UK has, the less it feels the pain, and the less it is useful for an adversary to undergo covert attacks.
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Please stop making up misinformation just because you think it might be useful for the nuclear industry.
What makes you believe I'm acting in favor of nuclear power? I'm wanting the best for the USA and her allies. There's many reasons to opposed offshore wind, among them is vulnerability to attack from a sophisticated foreign adversary like China or Russia, another is cost. Let us look at some numbers, shall we? There's many places to find numbers but Wikipedia is an easy place to find them so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I'd look at the IPCC numbers as I'd expect few people would claim they have an
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It wouldn't be something that we rely on, just a way to reduce our energy costs. We have some of the more expensive energy in the world because prices are basically set by gas generators, so the less gas we use the cheaper it will get. If Putin does damage the cable, we will have to fall back to fossil fuels or import more from elsewhere, until it is fixed.
There are a few projects like this around the world. There is some risk, nobody knows for sure if they can be protected well enough to be viable, but if
Don't discard foreign partners (Score:5, Interesting)
While I understand the objective of "homegrown power", connection to foreign suppliers is useful. When Spain went lights out, Morocco swapped from importing from Spain, to exporting 500 MW and seeded the restart and stabilised the network (in Spanish) https://www.mundiario.com/arti... [mundiario.com] . Great Britain as an Island has limited connectivity to its neighbours and needs to develop them to provide resilience https://eandt.theiet.org/2025/... [theiet.org] It currently operates a number of links to France, Belgium, Denmark, Norway for a total 10 GW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The cable to Morocco would have been a very expensive project and UK can develop connection to say, Spain, which it does not connect yet and has solar. Using partners in a different area is important as a storm could pull down connections simultaneously in UK, northern France and Belgium (something like Cyclone Lothar in 1999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )
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Maybe Morocco should look at what the UK might do with all that power (besides powering homes) and use their power domestically.
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It's not like Moroccan babies die when Morocco trades electricity with Spain or UK. Morocco already considers their needs before selling and they even have become an importer from Spain (they are phasing out fossil fuels) https://en.7news.ma/growth-at-... [7news.ma] While electricity will be useful to their bright future, Morocco is sitting on a gold mine and what they need right now is money to build the things that will consume their electricity. That money can come from exports from all the excess Saharan sun expos
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Maybe Morocco should look at what the UK might do with all that power (besides powering homes) and use their power domestically.
The thing is that, for the cheapest energy, wind and solar, Morocco and the UK have different timing and cycles. Morocco could have made money selling electricity to the UK when the UK needs it most and could also potentially have benefited from getting electricity from the UK in times when Morocco has less wind.
Increasing power transmission is a benefit for all, not just one end of the connection.
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That’s always true with all exports. The alternatives are use it domestically or export it and receive income. It’s often better value to export, receive income, and use part of that income to fund local additional usage.
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Yes but this isn't that. It makes little sense to interconnect to a grid that is effectively 3 countries away instead of strengthening existing grid ties. A grid is only a grid when it's not a stupidly long single run of cable. Spain doesn't make much sense either, because again that's a long cable. Better option is to increase supply to existing connections to France, Belgium, and Germany tying into the CESA grid, and let the CESA carry power from Spain upwards.
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> When Spain went lights out, Morocco swapped from importing from Spain, to exporting 500 MW and seeded the restart and stabilised the network
None of the UKs interconnectors are black start capable. None of the solar farms are. Only one wind farm is. The rest are traditional gas power stations.
We already have many interconnectors so unless this one is black start capable then I dont see a point in it.
Better with Iceland? (Score:2)
Other European countries should pick it up. (Score:4, Interesting)
If we have a look at solar influx maps, or just have general geography knowledge, it's pretty obvious that Northern Africa has enormous available areas that can be used for large scale solar plants. And lots of them at that. They can use solar towers for nighttime generation, and large areas filled with solar panels for daytime peak generation.
North Africa can, by investing on their own, become entirely energy independent. If they buy up some of the Chinese panel overproduction, and then generate their own expertise in installing large solar parks, they can easily supply domestic needs - and with cables, they can sell a heck of a lot of energy to an energy hungry Europe.
This again can be supplemented in both Europe and Northern Africa with grid scale battery storage, for nighttime usage. Northern Africa should of course invest in solar towers too - to ensure nighttime generation is also existent.
There's more than enough available space. The enormous untapped solar energy resources can be used for both export and for large domstic benefits such as water desalination etc.
Re: Other European countries should pick it up. (Score:2)
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There has been talks about this in Europe for 18 years already. The AEEP was launched in 2007 with this kind of goal in mind. The problem is it is a political minefield to build green energy for export to Europe when North Africa themselves have an carbon intensity problem in their energy industry. They are too poor to rapidly invest themselves, and it would be seen as outright exploitative for another country to come in and fund green energy for the purpose of export (in fact this would have negative CO2 b
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The "to poor to rapidly invest themselves" is simply false.
Egypt has a GDP of $396B . Morocco has a GDP of $144B.
To buy 1GW of Solar panels clocks in at $100M . A 10GW solar farm could be had for about $1B. ROI for such an investment is in low single digit number of years. Of course, there would be extra infrastructure investments in addition.
You're entirely right that Desertec et.al smelled of green imperialism, but implemented from the African side there's an incredible export profit to be made, and l
Retrofuturism worth reading (Score:3, Interesting)
In it, David McKay makes comments about future energy mix. If you look at the full PDF [inference.org.uk], the idea of a cable from northern Africa to elsewhere is explored starting page 178. Bear in mind this book was written late 90s/early 2000s with the last revision being 2008 (the author has sadly passed). Generating from Morocco appears on page 181.
Thoroughly good read and I recommend it to anyone interested in the mechanics and figures behind energy transitions. Clearly some will now be outdated...but it's surprising how little. A lot of what he suggested is now unfolding.
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That aspects are outdated 17 years after its last update does not surprise me. That it is fundamentally incorrect however...given the sources and calculations, I think you'll need a to provide a little more reasoning than "you should
Progress is being made (Score:2)
If domestic renewables in the UK can beat Morocco and HVDC, then we really are talking.
UK electricity market is a scam (Score:3, Interesting)
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They got rid of coal but instead of replacing it with renewables they replaced it with gas instead.
How is that a scam? It has led to significant reductions in CO2 emissions. Just because something doesn't suit your view doesn't make it a scam.
We have more than enough wind and solar capacity in this country but they turn the windmills off in order to profit from the gas charges.
No. They turn the windmills off due to transmission limitations
All because of gas profiteers using Putin as an excuse to rake in the money
No they aren't raking in the money. They are spending considerable amounts building LNG import facilities and regasifiers to import more expensive gas from a more supply constrained market. Yeah your gas price is higher, but it's the direct result of a policy not to appease Putin, not because someone is
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They got rid of coal [ourworldindata.org], but their gas use is also going down [ourworldindata.org] and their renewable use is going up [ourworldindata.org]. There's another country I could name that did do what you're claiming, but not the UK.
They also spend about £2.2 billion/year specifically on a fund that helps poor people not freeze to death, which is about $40/capita. LIHEAP in the US, which I think is the rough equivalent, is $6.1 billion/year which is about $18/capita. Not only is that less than half the amount, but the entire federal staff responsible
Dave’s bluster was just that, turns out (Score:2)
He came in, all piss and vinegar, with this vibe of the Serious Retail Exec who was going to professionalise and secure the funding. But he should have invested in advice from someone like David Yelland and built a more successful lobbying operation. I’d have much preferred to see this go ahead than sodding Sizewell C, which is clearly going to be just as pricey as Hinkley Point C, for all the guff about economies of learning. But these kinds of things require being politically adroit to get them off
Rolls-Royce SMR (Score:2)
Good (Score:2)
We have enough interconnectors as it is. In the current climate (political) having too many eggs in one basket is just asking for trouble considering the interconnectors are easily "damaged" by Russian "fishing vessels" that like earlier in the year just "accidentally" turned off their transponders while spending a good long while loitering around our undersea cables and making use of their submersibles which you'd think were a pretty odd thing for a "fishing vessel" to have eh?
This country needs to get it
There's no money (Score:2)
For ANYTHING.
Stupidest project ever (Score:1)
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ranks up there with the bridge to nowhere, which cost far less
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The cost includes building solar panels and wind turbines in Morocco to generate the power that's being exported, so it's generating a bit more than nothing. It's also supposedly about half the cost of generating the same power with nuclear, and building solar panels in the Sahara desert has some obvious advantages over building them in the UK, so I don't think it's that stupid.