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Grid: Renewable Baseload Power from a single desert location. Enough for 7 million homes!

Just Have a Think · 196.9K views · 2021-10-17 · 14:51

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Overview

A Just Have a Think video on the proposed 16 billion pound Xlinks project to build solar, wind and battery capacity in southern Morocco. It would send around 3.6GW to the UK by subsea HVDC cable as near-baseload power.

On Hacker News

Cited as a concrete example of a big renewable-plus-interconnector project in threads about nuclear costs, grid interconnects and submarine cables.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2021–2022

Topics

Renewables, batteries & storagePower grid, heating & buildings
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xlinkshvdcsolarmorocco-uksubsea cable

What people said

patrickk · 2022-05 · Reference

> In the long run I hope to see high capacity transcontinental HVDC lines linking continents so we can buy solar power from the other side of the Earth when it's night where we are, and sell our surplus when the sun is shining -- no batteries needed. That's hard and expensive. There are a bunch of projects in this space. I love going down this rabbit hole. The EU supergrid is already being built out, and doesn't require linking far flung continents since it links Norwegian hydro and North Sea wind power, among other sources. A mix of geographically distributed hydro, wind, solar, batteries and perhaps geothermal will negate the need for relying on solar + HVDC stretched around the globe along with the geopolitical risks. Some examples from past HN comments: [LINK] [LINK] Morocco-UK solar/wind/battery project: [VIDEO] Germany is aiming to get 100% of it's electricity from green sources by 2035, so expect a lot more projects in this space in future: [LINK]

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thrawn0r · 2021-11 · Reference

"global supply capacity of these cables is estimated at 4000 KM/p.a" [VIDEO] seems like a bottleneck.

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ximeng · 2021-10 · Reference

[VIDEO] more on the UK to Morocco solar / wind farm plan. 3,800km times four HVDC cables for redundancy. Global capacity around 4,000km of cable per year. So to make this project happen, need to open a new cable manufacturing facility. This video also suggests that this sort of renewable project will have an average cost of 48 GBP/MWh versus 92.50 GBP/MWh for new nuclear.

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Sources

Video by Just Have a Think, played through YouTube.

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