> Alongside the consistent output from its solar panels and wind turbines, an onsite 20GWh/5GW battery facility provide sufficient storage to reliably deliver each and every day
Four hour battery storage for renewables. The way of the future.
> This “first of a kind” project will generate 10.5GW of zero carbon electricity from the sun and wind to deliver 3.6GW of reliable energy for an average of 20+ hours a day.
The classic error, mixing up units: "3.6GW of reliable energy". The writer certainly means power here. [1] I work in energy, and have had teams like legal (and tools like Grammarly) think we're just mixing up words for fun. Regardless, definitely seems like a very sufficient install to supply real power and charge the battery for load shifting at utility scale.
[1]: https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Energy_vs_power
Grid demand is also significantly higher in the daytime so that 4h of battery allows you to very closely match users demands over 24 hours or ramp up during peak demand and fall back on other sources at night.
Furthermore, cost of storage is falling even faster than wind or solar ever did. Wait until next year, and you get lots more storage for your money.
Finally, batteries are good for very short-term storage -- their round-trip efficiency and fast response are unbeatable -- but they cost more than alternatives. For storage that you don't need to draw down every night, something you can fill cheap tanks with is better even if round-trip efficiency is low. Something you can also sell when your local tanks are full, and buy if they seem likely to go dry, is better yet.
So, expect to see a lot of anhydrous ammonia long-term storage. Also, hydrogen, and liquid nitrogen. And, lots of tropical sites synthesizing for export to higher latitudes in winter, and lots of higher-latitude cities importing it, via ship, in place of LNG and oil.
It is kind of surprising to see the batteries set up in Morocco, not in UK. That might be politics. Typically, storage is best sited near point-of-use. Maybe part of the deal is Morocco gets to use a share of the energy.
In other words, the battery would bridge exactly 4 hours of 0% power generation. The moment you have more than 0% power generation but still less than 100%, the battery will last more than 4 hours of wall clock time.
It is usually a mistake to overbuild batteries. The money is better spent on PV panels, wind turbines, and grid tie-ins and, eventually, other storage media.
Also, the "time" of the battery is just a function of storage size and inverter sizing at peak discharge. It's often selected based on how the operator expects it to be used. (For example, Tesla sells megapacks in 2hr/4hr variants [1], and I think a lot of other grid-scale storage works this way. A 2hr megapack replaces some battery bays with more inverters.) While the battery is 4 hour capable, the operator could really intend for this to provide a constant overnight supply, and it could certainly provide that.
Only the beginning of the way i hope. 4 hours isn't even close to being enough for "reliable" electricity generation.
Beyond that, other technologies (pumped hydro, perhaps hydrogen electrolysis) are more economical.
1. https://storagewiki.epri.com/index.php/Energy_Storage_101/Te...
I assume batteries in 10 years will be vastly better/cheaper.
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/20000-volts-under-the-sea
"The Xlinks project is a pretty good concept, and yet…it needs access to materials already claimed by many others at prices increasing by the day, it needs to build an entire HVDC industry in Britain from the ground up, and it needs money, lots of it."
Britain already has several HVDC undersea interconnectors with Europe. These are maintained and there is design and construction capability. If not in Britain, then nearby.
1. https://www.northsealink.com/
2. https://www.ifa1interconnector.com/
3. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/energy-policy-and-regulation/policy... (Scroll down for electricity.)
Given that the UK has left the EU, couldn't you call every trade deal or cultural exchange with a non-EU country a Brexit project?
Even if it is, what is wrong with that? The people of Britain voted for Brexit and now need their elected officials to deliver, which motivates projects like these
Edit: to clarify, i live in London and i didn't vote for Brexit. Regardless of the outcome, I consider it a national security issue and a productivity boost to have cheap energy collected from a diverse set of sources from solar plants abroad to domestic nuclear energy plants and off-shore wind turbines.
If you live in Britain, would you really prefer Britain stop investing in projects like these, just because there was an election result you disagreed with?
We are where we are. Politics is a thing.
If it pushes along the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, I don't care if it's "inefficient". Show me a major company that hasn't wasted money or done something in a way that is technically less than optimal.
the desired position of many is that the UK should crawl off into a corner and almost die, then will have to come crawling back to the EU to show that is indispensable
projects like this work counter to that narrative
The latter being a dictionary definition of a bad idea, the first being the buffoons who lied about it, flying kites, tossing dead cats around to manipulate the conversation and ultimately shove it through, half cocked.
This looks like yet another kite to be sold with: "Look what we can do now we're out of that wretched EU".
Possibly a nice idea, aggressively detached from reality.
But as you brought it up, even if there was a semi-conductor breakthrough tomorrow the political reasons to go direct would still be there. The EU wants the UK to be subservient to the Commission for ideological, political and economic reasons. The UK doesn't want to be back in that situation. The EU would absolutely make energy transit dependent on all manner of entirely irrelevant topics - fish is the current one but there would be others - and thus making electricity supplies dependent on the EU would end up being equivalent to being sucked back in, not as a member state but as a vassal state.
What a load of Brexiteer crap. The UK was never subservient, they were among the top decision makers and powers in the EU. Brexit UK wants to have its cake and eat it too and is simply impossible. You can't be independent from the EU on trade and power simply because of the proximity and history. Blindly cutting off your nose to spite the EU is as dumb as it was when all of this started. As soon as the UK recognises it needs the EU as much as the EU needs it, all will be better.
Few egregious examples of the UK being intentionally obtuse to spite the EU while also harming itself - refusals to accept existing treaties on a bunch of stuff, refusal to accept treaties they signed a few months ago. The whole NI question for which they still haven't accepted a solution. The fish debacle ( the UK refusing to license EU-based ships).
The whole idea of the EU is that all nations in it are subservient to the commission. We like it that way because that makes the collaboration more rational and it makes the rising tide lift all the boats. Wether you agree with it or not, the idea of the Brexit is that the UK can be strong without the EU, possibly even stronger. Wether that will happen remains to be seen.
But how can you say they can't be independent of the EU in power while commenting on an article that's literally about them establishing power bypassing the EU?
I'd love for the UK to come back to us in the EU. But their "intentional obtuse"-ness is exactly what they should be doing to make good on their promises to the citizens of the UK.
The fish debacle ( the UK refusing to license EU-based ships).
There are lots of licensed EU fishing vessels. Note that Jersey isn't actually a part of the UK, technically it's a Crown Dependency. Anyway. The full story of the dispute is much more complicated than that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Jersey_dispute
Summary:
- After Brexit an amnesty period was agreed before the new fishing permissions were enforced on UK/Jersey territorial waters.
- French fishermen reacted by adopting unsustainable fishing techniques like aggressive trawling. Basically trying to extract as much marine wealth as possible before they were restricted. "Young accused French trawlers of "breaking the spirit of the amnesty" and that due to recent dredging by French trawlers that Jersey's marine ecology "won’t take this for much longer and, if it goes on, we will have to close the area off for years". This hadn't been anticipated in the agreement and appears to have poisoned relations from the get-go.
- The agreement involved granting licenses to fishermen who had been fishing there previously and could evidence that. The French authorities weren't submitting valid evidence to the Jersey authorities (blaming bureaucratic screwups like lost documents).
- Because the evidence wasn't meeting the requirements, licenses weren't always being issued quickly.
So far, ordinary bureaucracy. It should have never really reached public attention at all, as it could have been sorted out between the local authorities. Unfortunately what followed was this:
1. Blockades of Jersey harbor by the French fishermen, with the French government doing nothing.
2. French boats were repeatedly caught illegally fishing, claiming they'd been told by the French government they could fish wherever they wanted. See the trawling problems above.
3. Shortly after, the French government banned Jersey fishermen from landing fish in France. No justification was given. This was in violation of the agreement and Jersey thus said it'd appeal to the EU Commission. That was not only ignored but the French simply escalated the ban to include all freight movements, again, in plain violation of the agreements.
4. The French government then escalated again and threatened multiple times to cut off Jersey's electricity supply in retaliation.
From the UK's perspective this was all well out of proportion to the scale of the problem. Also it involved unilateral violations of the agreement by France, no workable suggestions for how to do things better and after that an MEP argued that it should be escalated to full blown trade sanctions. Without passing judgement on which side was "right" in this dispute it's obvious why the UK would want to diversity energy supplies away from the EU.
Also, it's kind of funny how you say it has absolutely nothing to do with Brexit and immediately jump into an anti-EU rant, probably not the smoothest transition :D
Honestly, the EU27 have their own home-grown grid problems to deal with[0], helping third countries transit power through the EU territories must be right at the bottom of the list!
Austria and Germany had a single electricity price zone ... until October 2018, one of the reasons blamed for the split was "slow grid expansion"[1].
[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/german-ele...
[1] https://www.apg.at/api/sitecore/projectmedia/download?id=24f...
These things are all matters of fact. From the EU's perspective these things are not "negative" exactly, but merely the way they play the game. Everything is connected to everything else and any inter-dependency may become leverage in any unrelated area of cooperation at any time.
You mean, the UK was one of the three largest powers in the EU with all the power to influence its policy and direction which it did.
Instead, the UK adopted the attitude of "we are a superpower, you owe us everything, we owe you nothing" to which the planet's largest economic union and one of the planet's largest markets calmly responded, "u wot mate?"
About a year into the whole Brexit brouhaha the EU said, look, here are the various agreements and levels of agreements we have with all the countries [1] (taking from the amazing short overview here [2]). You don't want Norway style because "it's EU with extra steps", you don't want Switzerland-style because "same thing", you don't want Ukraine or Turkey-style because you don't want to be bound by EU trade agreements etc.
At every step of the way UK's reaction was "these Brussels democrats are smothering our great independent nation, they must give us everything we want". That's not how negotiations work. Especially not with an economic block of ~450 million people who are your biggest trading partners.
And after all that puffing and chest-beating, almost seven years into the whole Brexit ordeal UK also "suddenly" discovered the whole Northern Ireland border issue. Which tells you a lot about the competence of your government.
So, no. UK went from being the country with the largest influence on EU policy to an outside country that has to deal with the EU on the same terms as every other country from outside the EU.
The point of mentioning Brexit is to stress that the physics alone makes this sort of project hard to justify on technical grounds, specially when there is a wealth of renewable energy projects right around Britain's corner.
You need to be specially motivated to circumvent any of the low-hanging fruit projects with European nations to head down to Africa to get your electricity.
If it's an idea obvious enough to occur to a teenager 20 years ago it hardly requires politics to explain why it comes up now, does it? At the time I gave up on the idea because either I didn't find out about HVDC or it wasn't as effective as it is now. Transmission losses seemed to kill the idea. Now apparently that's more or less solved and other issues dominate like manufacturing costs and mineral availability.
As for renewables being abundant near by - where? UK already built tons of windmills. You can't get baseload-level renewable power from adding more of those because there are days when the wind stops blowing. As for solar in Europe, land is at a premium there and they're already wanting to use available resources for their own needs, rightly so. Also worth considering - for unclear reasons global wind speeds have been slowing down over time. Long term wind projects need to factor that in to their economic calculations. Solar doesn't have that issue.
Last time I checked the UK was still the sole country in the world refusing an official ambassador status to the representative of the EU and the sole country to have threaten to unilaterally withdraw from an international treaty with the EU in clear breach of international law. I think your definition of genuine and mine differ substantially.
As we should be. "We" spent years going "we've got the EU over a barrel, we'll make them bend to our whim, they need us more than we need them". Brexiteers now finding out that "leaving the EU" means we're no longer on their side and negotiating against 27 united countries sucks, well it would be funny if it wasn't hurting so many people.
In fact it tends not to think of the UK at all, these days.
As to being "fair game": that's true, in the sense that the EU will place the interests of member states over those of the UK. That dynamic must be among the least surprising developments of history, considering it is both obvious and formed the core of every serious prediction in the run-up to Brexit.
There was plenty of swagger back in those days with fantasies of renewed UK superpower domineering the EU and extracting every concession it can think of. "Fantasy" because that's just not how it works if the other party makes up 60 % of your foreign trade, but you make up less than 10 % of theirs.
So here we are now, with the UK coming up with these harebrained schemes that feel like some party organized with the specific purpose of not inviting your ex.
I've just paid a €5 handling fee (just the handling fee, there was zero customs fee or any VAT levied) to receive an item sent by post from the UK to the EU, it was sent by post with a declared value of £3, and labelled as a gift.
Yes, I know all about declaring artificially low customs values - been there, done that - but in this case it was a single item of used childrens clothing, the best part of 40 years old(!) and of absolutely zero value other than to the recipient, it was being gifted from one generation to the next.
Somehow cheap electronics orders from China seem have always sailed through EU customs just fine :/
OTOH I can fly to Stansted for less than €10 all-in. Maybe next time it would be cheaper to fly to the UK and collect in person. Given the challenges of climate change, this option in particular appears to demonstrate how not-joined-up international policymaking currently is :(
So the UK should get over itself, connect to larger grid that’s already operating on three sides. The same is probably true for Morocco, and at some point these photovoltaic-in-the-desert ideas will become economical, although I’m not entirely sure if we are there yet (the desert is less ideal for solar cells than one thinks, because heat isn’t linear proportional to irradiation).
There was a fire recently, but it's a strategic connection.
https://ifa1interconnector.com/
Also the UK is connected to Norway
And Ireland also
https://www.eirgridgroup.com/customer-and-industry/interconn...
Politically, maybe. Technically and financially, not at all.
There’s 3GW of interconnection between france and the UK with a 4th under construction, and france is a broker / hub between germany, italy, spain, and the UK (as well as its own production).
Also it would seem the south of France or Portugal would be much closer for the solar part.
If this is economical enough - I'd be all for it rather than paying energy companies to keep coal-fired power stations ready to belch out smog at a moments notice.
From the article:
> When domestic renewable energy generation in the United Kingdom drops due to low winds and short periods of sun, the project will harvest the benefits of long hours of sun in Morocco
At the same time, the electrification of heating + transport is predicted to approximately double UK electricity demand by 2050. So even if this goes ahead and works as intended, it will end up providing something like 4% of the UK's needs.
A whole bunch of comments here comparing this idea negatively to wind, nuclear or tankers filled with hydrogen (?!). Even if it goes ahead, there need to be like a dozen other new projects of similar scale just to meet demand on these small islands. If you also want to provide carbon free electricity to the other 10 billion people likely to be living on this planet by that 2050, then you need to multiply that dozen projects by a factor of at least 100.
Separately, if at some random point in the future the relations between the UK and Morocco go south, it’s much easier to change suppliers if you use tankers. The EU is investing massively in Hydrogen, so the Worldwide Hydrogen market will be quite mature in 10 to 20 years.
Even from Morocco’s point of view, the same calculus applies. If the UK sanctions Morocco, and refuses to take delivery of electricity, how do you find an alternate buyer if the transmission line is in place? With Hydrogen tankers, you simply start selling to China or someone else, or you put the Hydrogen in some medium-long term storage. This gives you more leeway to negotiate whatever diplomatic situation you found yourself in.
Cameras/sensors, and fast response time. You could put a sensor package every couple km. Given the amount of power this installation delivers, it wouldn't exactly break the bank.
There has been a significant push back against the project locally and so I suspect it won’t be built to the scale proposed. The main criticism is that the land is particularly fertile.
0: https://www.mallardpasssolar.co.uk/
1: https://www.stamfordmercury.co.uk/news/amp/clock-is-ticking-...
It's very very far from being a perfect or even good country (for most of us moroccans), but it has an almost bulletproof record w.r.t foreign investment. The usually very slow "makhzen" (state bureaucracy) can suddenly become super super efficient to attract foreign capital. Tanger-MED and the huge automobile industry around it is a very good example of that.
EDIT: Belgium and Norway is the fourth and fifth respectively, and apparently Denmark is planned.
I'm just commenting upon the likely motivations are primarily domestic politics and geopolitics given its pretty obvious that you could achieve similar results by doing this with onshore wind and solar installations in southern Spain with lower technical and cost requirements.
Its definitely true that outside of the EU we are going to be treated differently than if we were EU members. EU members will always come first, and geopolitical spats with say Spain over Gibraltar or France over fishing that would otherwise get mediated via the EU could now be higher risk in future.
the government agrees: https://news.sky.com/story/jersey-fishing-dispute-frances-si...
(and has denied construction of new interconnectors to France since)
Spain would definitely use an interconnector as leverage re: Gibraltar
Aquind cancellation is about financial stability of the developper, its russian origin, and politicals connections to the tories and also ecological interest groups lobbying on both side of the interconnector.
Every country in the EU submit to the majority law, that's the idea of an union, even France or Germany do not have everything to their liking every time.
A few percent more sun, cheaper builders, I can understand this choice.
Morocco isn't Russia, but handing your life support to a distant and culturally different country in a less stable world region with limited history of partnership (European colonisation until the 1950s) seems daft. I mean, compared to building nuclear power inside UK territory and wind farms off shore of the UK. For national security reasons if not environmental ones.
[1] https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live
[2] https://abmec.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2021-02-Moro...
As horrible as it sounds, Morocco isn't a nuclear power and would be crushed in an afternoon by UK armed forces while western media across the planet creates a hundred different justifications and the world's diplomats send their congratulations for neutralising the energy terrorists because they couldn't care less what happens to them.
This is a completely different situation wrt to Germany <-> Russia
> Morocco isn't a nuclear power and would be crushed in an afternoon by UK
> This is a completely different situation wrt to Germany <-> Russia
The irony is palpable. Yes, the UK would probably get a "win" but not in an afternoon and this energy project would be destroyed - rather pointless.
You could just have coal reserves on standby and contingency energy deals with France.
The only remotely conceivable way that the UK would have of projecting significant power onto the Moroccan mainland is by trying to foment a civil war. Otherwise they would not get anything out of it.
If the US even allowed the UK to do such a foolish thing, it would be disastrous long-term for the whole of Europe. Completely alienating and breaking off with North Africa means that Europe is now completely surrounded with unfriendly countries.
Morocco is even within reasonable distance for the UK to run sorties from UK air bases, let alone including aircraft carriers, cruise missile attacks from submarines, etc.
> deliver 3.6GW of reliable energy
and
> be capable of supplying 8 percent of Great Britain’s electricity needs
...from which I assume they're projecting a total energy consumption of about 3.6/0.08 = 45GW in 2030.
Perhaps, but making yourself a vital part of keeping the lights on for a country with a brutal colonial history within living memory, a much more capable military, and a military base 36 miles from Tangier… seems even more daft.
The UK can't quit Russian oil, coal, and gas any faster than Germany - that should teach you a lesson.
I'm intrigued by how 1,500km² of partial shade will transform the Sahara ecosystem.
I hope it will make more life possible in the shade.
The Gibraltar issue crops up every now and then for instance so having control over an electrical connection gives the Spanish government more leverage.
Same with France and the dispute over fishing waters. Only recently France were threatening to cut off power to Jersey.
Just want to add that it was a bit different than that. More exactly, an English newspaper asked a French official if cutting electricity off was a possibility and that official answered nothing more than "the treaty that was agreed upon does include this as a possibility".
It was never an actual threat or in any plan at the time.
My fellow humans remember a thing: a national grid is not national because of politics but because a such critical part of a country infra it's better to be self-sufficient under nation borders and hopefully self-sufficient inside those borders even in case of major attacks (translated, not few big power plants, but many small and a distribution network designed to survive significant damages).
We, westerners have had the best industry and technology in the world, now for some neoliberals economic devastating ideas we pull it apart outsourcing anything because that's pay back, in thin air, well, and now we see a new world power, China, arise and we see our power wane. How much damage we want to take before annihilating with lifelong court rulings against those economy-driven society? We really want to wait till being completely lost?
So you better think this over long and hard before sending your cheap submarine down there.
Personally I'd be much more concerned about the kind of damage marine life, fishing and cargo ships would do to that cable and how to armor against that. Probably by the time you've taken all that into account you have also defended against that sub. And finally, the same thing of course goes for all of those other undersea cables, communications ones for instance.
Such attacks can even disable half a country grid just due to the big drop in frequency of the whole grid, spark enormous outrage and can also be both really damaging and really quick to fix. Life it's complicated, where no one can easy see anything can happen, design things to avoid potential attack surface is a good way to protect themselves.
We do not normally have strokes, but we put defibrillators everywhere for a reason, we do not have much car accidents but we design cars to make us survive important ones etc. A critical infra like an energy grid... Oh, sure we in the west are equally dependent on foreign supply chains for oil, uranium etc but we stockpile them a bit, months for oil, an year or two for uranium, it's not the same of electricity in a grid...
Just see how many issues are there due to some supply chain issues in south China or the "Ever given" crisis in Suez. We are already hyper-vulnerable planning even bigger vulnerabilities for the future it does not sound that smart to me.
In China, there is a 3300 km line like this moving 12GW of power. This is a little bit longer, but not by much.
Longer distance runs of AC can have a lot of losses though due to inductance, especially when they’re close to large conductive masses (like seawater or earth).
DC requires expensive conversion equipment to get back to AC for the grid.
AC is cheap for short runs. Usually AC vs DC high voltage starts to be equally cost effective around the several hundred miles of buried lines, and a clear winner around the 1000 mile range (efficiency and capex wise).
HVDC can also allow grid balancing when disparate grids are connected (different frequencies and voltages for instance).
The longest submarine HVDC line today is something like 600 km. There are no UHVDC submarine lines.
I am more interested (again if the project is a go) what happens if / when some "friendly" people will mess with the cable.
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/20000-volts-under-the-sea?s=...
This is NOT technology is GEOPOLITICS, and it sucks!
This is just the brexiters bending backward to not be part of Europe. It feels like a socially incapable person leaving a party where (s)he was wanted and esteemed because (s)he has deep trust issues. Or more likely, because (s)he can't sit at an Arthurian round table of equals. Wishing to be the top dog or nothing.
