It sounds like chat down the pub. “It’s very sunny in Morocco, so why don’t we just bring Solar Power from Morocco to the UK?”

Well, this is the exact premise of the XLINKS project. Octopus Energy have recently invested £5 million into the scheme, and are using this in their advertising at the moment, so you might have seen it on your travels.

To say the scheme is ambitious is an understatement. But as Sir Dave Lewis (former Tesco Chair, now Executive Chair of XLINKS) points out XLINKS “doesn’t require a technological breakthrough.” The individual pieces of the scheme are established technologies, from the solar panels themselves (all 12 million of them) to the undersea cable linking Morocco to the UK (but not remotely as long as this currently exists in an under-sea format). Putting them all together is a huge but exiting engineering challenge.

Like anything, the project needs to stack up financially. XLINKS is seeking a Power Purchase Agreement with the UK Government. Similar arrangements were famously made at Hinckley Point Nuclear Power Station, for £92.50 per Mega Watt Hour (MWh) of electricity. Set against this, the £48 per MWh that XLINKS is seeking seems to be a bargain, but it is more than recent deals for Offshore Wind in the North Sea.

So what is the case for doing the XLINKS Morocco-UK project, compared to any more locally produced renewable schemes, which are most likely cheaper to deliver and come at a lower project risk?

The answer is assured delivery of 3.6 Gigawatts of electricity for 20 hours per day throughout the year, with zero carbon emissions at the point of generation. This 3.6 GW represents about 7% of the UK’s power requirements.

It is this promise of reliable delivery of power that sets this apart from UK based renewable energy generation. For a long time the arguments against renewable power have been twofold – cost and reliability. The cost argument has largely disappeared as the cost of delivering solar and wind projects has shrunk dramatically in recent years.

But the reliability has certainly not been overcome. Most of the thinking and research at the moment is going into how to store electricity when generation is abundant for use later. This is where everything from Home Storage Batteries, Vehicle to Grid and Pumped Hydro Storage come into play. More exotic ideas propose that green hydrogen can be manufactured during periods of abundance for use months later.

So the idea that you can get a reliable 3.6 GW from Morocco is certainly very interesting.

XLINKS are hoping to progress the project over the next 24 months to the stage where everything is in place pending a UK Government Purchase Power Agreement at the necessary price. With so many national scale infrastructure projects subject to political wrangling (just think of Nuclear Power or HS2) we may have a while to wait before this project enters construction. But the possibilities that this concept opens up are incredibly interesting – so watch this space!

How does this all relate to domestic solar energy? Well as we consistently advocate here at Brimstone Energy, all solar energy projects really need to be paired with a Home Storage Battery in order to truly harness the benefits of renewable power – due to the unpredictable nature of the British weather.

However if your home isn’t suitable for solar, but you have an EV with access to a cheap overnight electricity rate, then installing a home storage battery on its own might be the solution for you.

Contact us to have a detailed conversation about your circumstances.

Brimstone Energy – For all your home energy needs.