Grid: Renewable Baseload Power from a single desert location. Enough for 7 million homes!
Just Have a ThinkCited 4× on HN, 2021–2022
explainer · general · 2021–2022 on HN
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.
Cited as a concrete example of a big renewable-plus-interconnector project in threads about nuclear costs, grid interconnects and submarine cables.
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4 comments from Hacker News
> 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: ▶ this 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
"global supply capacity of these cables is estimated at 4000 KM/p.a" ▶ this video seems like a bottleneck.
▶ this 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.
Morocco-UK Power Project: ▶ this video Australian - ASEAN Power Link: link Edit: oops, now it's called Australia - Asia Power Link.