A project to power Britain using solar farms thousands of miles away in the Sahara is moving closer to fruition.
The project's backers are about to commission the world’s biggest cable-laying ship, which will then lay four parallel cables linking solar and wind farms in the desert in Morocco with a substation in a tiny village near the coast of Devon, in south west England. Once completed, the scheme is expected to deliver about 8 percent of the UK's total power demand.
Xlinks is also building a factory in Scotland to manufacture the 10,000 miles of cable required to connect the UK with the northern Sahara desert - hopefully by 2030.
Simon Morrish, co-founder of the Xlinks project and group chief executive, said the aim was to overcome the intermittency of UK wind and solar, and the project has already been declared one of “national significance” by Claire Coutinho, the Energy Secretary.
The Xlinks scheme involves laying cables carrying high voltage direct current power along the coasts of Spain, Portugal and France, coming ashore in North Africa. There, they will connect with seven solar farms and up to 1,000 wind turbines built across an area of Moroccan desert roughly the size of greater London.
The expected energy output is slightly more than the power to be generated by the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant, which is predicted to cost around £46bn ($58bn) when completed in the early 2030s - more than double the cost of Xlinks.