'I've put every penny I have into this': Xlinks chief claims $25bn Morocco-UK cable plan can change green power for ever

As it happens, several times a year there are three-week periods where the capacity factor of wind farms “doesn’t get above 20%,” according to Morrish. “The solutions we’ve got” – including battery storage – “can’t solve that.”

The answer, says Morrish, is his $25bn plan to pump 3.6GW of Saharan solar and wind power from Morocco to the UK through a 3,800km undersea HVDC cable. Xlinks claims that by 2030 it could power over seven million UK homes and meet around 8% of British electricity needs.

The 10.5GW of wind and solar and 5GW/22.5GWh of battery storage Xlinks plans to build in the Moroccan desert would be able to power the UK grid up to 20 hours a day, he said, including peak hours when it’s really needed.

“This is why what we’re delivering to the grid is so valuable.”

'Entrepreneur needed'

Although he is the brains behind what would be a landmark project, Morrish stresses that this is not a new idea – “people have been talking about covering the Sahara desert with solar panels for a couple of decades now.”

Morrish got the idea for Xlinks in 2018, when he realised “just how cheap” renewables are in North Africa and the Middle East compared to fossil fuels. “I did a bit of soul searching and went, ‘Why is nobody doing this because it’s so obvious and so economic.’”

He concluded that large companies “aren’t prepared to take this kind of risk” on something new so it really needed an entrepreneur to “give it a go.”

And while it is a huge project with lots of different parts, none of these are “technically difficult,” he said. “It’s a big battery, big solar panels, big wind and a long cable and then two big converter stations,” which will land the power in Devon in the UK’s southwest.

So Xlinks is really just “putting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together and doing it in such a way in which we can make it work.”

“These long-distance interconnectors solve the intermittency of renewables,” said Morrish, imagining a world where the UK grid is getting green energy pumped from not just Morocco but other far-flung locations including the US and Iceland.

There is a “lovely chart” that shows in 1990 there were six data cables across the oceans, he said. A few decades later and there are hundreds. “There are no reasons why we can’t do the same for electricity cables.”

Investing in a grid that can shift energy between regions is much cheaper than solving the intermittency of renewables by “overbuilding” wind at four or five times the capacity factor needed, he said, or overbuilding battery storage.

Once Xlinks and other similar projects show the concept is workable, Morrish said this could “spearhead a whole new industry of long-distance interconnectors.”

Morrish adds that Xlinks is already working on another project that will be announced soon for a long-distance interconnector not involving the UK.

'Incredibly risky'

Undertaking such a project is “incredibly risky,” said Morrish. “I have put every single penny I have into this and passed the hat around friends.”

Ultimately though the “economics just fundamentally stack up.”

Solar and wind in Morocco is about a quarter of the cost to produce than it is in the UK, claims Morrish.

Green hydrogen is another potential solution, he said. But once you’ve produced the energy for that through wind and solar, electrolysed it, compressed it, transported it, stored it and then finally put it back through a fuel cell or turbine, “you’re down to 30% efficiency or less.”

“Ours is 85% efficiency" at a “third of the cost” of hydrogen.

He also claims Xlinks will produce energy at less than two-thirds the price of nuclear and can be built in “less than half the time.”

Morrish said that while Xlinks has high up-front costs, the operating expenses will be “very very low” and it is “very competitive in terms of pricing.”

Shadow of Nord Stream

“We always knew that was a risk,” said Morrish, adding that they have a number of ways to mitigate that that he “can’t go into.”

“When you think about security, anything is vulnerable,” he said, whether offshore wind turbines, a gas-fired powerplant or the UK’s Hinkley Point nuclear power station.

“So it doesn’t surprise me that Nord Stream has been blown up. It won’t surprise me that there will be more cables that are cut.”

The difference to Nord Stream is that the Xlinks cable will be “pretty easy to fix,” he said. It is also made up of two separate cables that are not interlinked, so even if there was an issue with one that won’t cause “lights going out” in the UK.