This is rad.<p>> Alongside the consistent output from its solar panels and wind turbines, an onsite 20GWh/5GW battery facility provide sufficient storage to reliably deliver each and every day<p>Four hour battery storage for renewables. The way of the future.<p>> This “first of a kind” project will generate 10.5GW of zero carbon electricity from the sun and wind to deliver 3.6GW of reliable energy for an average of 20+ hours a day.<p>The classic error, mixing up units: "3.6GW of reliable energy". The writer certainly means power here. [1] I work in energy, and have had teams like legal (and tools like Grammarly) think we're just mixing up words for fun. Regardless, definitely seems like a very sufficient install to supply real power and charge the battery for load shifting at utility scale.<p>[1]: <a href="https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Energy_vs_power" rel="nofollow">https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Energy_vs_power</a>
The latest Doomberg does a great job in pointing out the practical flaws.<p><a href="https://doomberg.substack.com/p/20000-volts-under-the-sea" rel="nofollow">https://doomberg.substack.com/p/20000-volts-under-the-sea</a><p>"The Xlinks project is a pretty good concept, and yet…it needs access to materials already claimed by many others at prices increasing by the day, it needs to build an entire HVDC industry in Britain from the ground up, and it needs money, lots of it."
This sounds like brexiteer project. Doubt this will actually happen. 3800 km of undersea HVDC cable just to circumvent the EU. 3800 km is the distance from St.Petersburg to Marocco.
So if it goes ahead it will generate 10.5GW, but deliver 3.6GW for "20+ hours a day". I guess the 10.5GW figure is peak generation during the day with lots of wind + sun, then by using batteries it will be able to consistently deliver approx 1/3 of that, or 8% of current UK demand (from the article). Makes sense, but the headline used by the submission is a bit misleading.<p>At the same time, the electrification of heating + transport is predicted to approximately double UK electricity demand by 2050. So even if this goes ahead and works as intended, it will end up providing something like 4% of the UK's needs.<p>A whole bunch of comments here comparing this idea negatively to wind, nuclear or tankers filled with hydrogen (?!). Even if it goes ahead, there need to be like a dozen other new projects of similar scale just to meet demand on these small islands. If you also want to provide carbon free electricity to the other 10 billion people likely to be living on this planet by that 2050, then you need to multiply that dozen projects by a factor of at least 100.
I find liquefied Hydrogen to make more sense. In case of conflict (like now), undersea cables can be sabotaged with plausible deniability. The Royal Navy can protect a tanker en route from Morocco to UK, or a convoy of such tankers, there were two times in the not so distant history when it had to do just that. But how do you protect a continuous line of a few thousand km?<p>Separately, if at some random point in the future the relations between the UK and Morocco go south, it’s much easier to change suppliers if you use tankers. The EU is investing massively in Hydrogen, so the Worldwide Hydrogen market will be quite mature in 10 to 20 years.<p>Even from Morocco’s point of view, the same calculus applies. If the UK sanctions Morocco, and refuses to take delivery of electricity, how do you find an alternate buyer if the transmission line is in place? With Hydrogen tankers, you simply start selling to China or someone else, or you put the Hydrogen in some medium-long term storage. This gives you more leeway to negotiate whatever diplomatic situation you found yourself in.
This is really interesting in the context of what is happening locally to my home, we are about two miles from what is planned to be the UK largest domestic solar farm [0,1]. It will output 350MW, so the one proposed in Morocco will be about 28 times the size.<p>There has been a significant push back against the project locally and so I suspect it won’t be built to the scale proposed. The main criticism is that the land is particularly fertile.<p>0: <a href="https://www.mallardpasssolar.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mallardpasssolar.co.uk/</a><p>1: <a href="https://www.stamfordmercury.co.uk/news/amp/clock-is-ticking-on-solar-farm-views-9230167/" rel="nofollow">https://www.stamfordmercury.co.uk/news/amp/clock-is-ticking-...</a>
UK is currently generating 30GW from all sources[1], so 10GW is a third of the national power requirement. Germany has just had a hard lesson in having significant energy dependency on Russia. Morocco is UK's 61st largest trading partner[2].<p>Morocco isn't Russia, but handing your life support to a distant and culturally different country in a less stable world region with limited history of partnership (European colonisation until the 1950s) seems daft. I mean, compared to building nuclear power inside UK territory and wind farms off shore of the UK. For national security reasons if not environmental ones.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live" rel="nofollow">https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live</a><p>[2] <a href="https://abmec.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2021-02-Morocco-DIT-Factsheet.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://abmec.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2021-02-Moro...</a>
> <i>The Morocco-UK Power Project will be powered by a wind and solar farm, approximately 1,500km² in size</i><p>I'm intrigued by how 1,500km² of partial shade will transform the Sahara ecosystem.<p>I hope it will make more life possible in the shade.
I wonder what it would take to cut say a year off the time line; I realize 5 years isn't huge for a big project, but being pretty desperate for energy I wonder what it would take.
Oh, nice, so in case of wars a cheap submarine can just put a small and cheap charge deep in the sea and boom, 10GWp power are out of the UK national grid. How nice.<p>My fellow humans remember a thing: a national grid is not national because of politics but because a such critical part of a country infra it's better to be self-sufficient under nation borders and hopefully self-sufficient inside those borders even in case of major attacks (translated, not few big power plants, but many small and a distribution network designed to survive significant damages).<p>We, westerners have had the best industry and technology in the world, now for some neoliberals economic devastating ideas we pull it apart outsourcing anything because that's pay back, in thin air, well, and now we see a new world power, China, arise and we see our power wane. How much damage we want to take before annihilating with lifelong court rulings against those economy-driven society? We really want to wait till being completely lost?
Given how many from the comments and me have come to understand this is a BREXIT move I just want to say:<p>This is NOT technology is GEOPOLITICS, and it sucks!