Massive UK-Morocco Subsea Power Cable Project Advances, Promising Renewable Energy Boost

Xlinks has already presented to the British government the components of the project to build the 3,800 km submarine electric cable that will connect Morocco and the United Kingdom, reports The Edge Markets. The overall cost of the project is £16 billion (US$21.9 billion). The British company will build a 10.5 GW power plant (7 GW for solar and 3.5 GW for wind) in Morocco. The transmission cable will consist of four cables. The first cable will be active at the beginning of 2027, while the rest should be launched in 2029.

This energy will be sold to the United Kingdom through the high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission cable, which will connect Morocco to several sites in Wales and Devon, United Kingdom. Xlinks sets the average cost of a megawatt-hour at £48, a little more than half the price agreed by the government for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant. "The energy comes from a region (Morocco, ed.) that has completely different weather conditions and is not correlated, so it provides huge amounts of resilience to the British energy system," said Simon Morrish, founder and CEO of Xlinks, stating that it could power seven million British households.

"The Xlinks Morocco-UK electricity project will be a new fully renewable solar and wind powered electricity generation facility combined with a battery storage facility. Located in the renewable-rich Moroccan region of Guelmim Oued Noun, it will cover an area of approximately 1,500 km² and be exclusively connected to Great Britain via 3,800 km HVDC submarine cables," can be read on the company’s website.