Grid: Renewable Baseload Power from a single desert location. Enough for 7 million homes!
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as a concrete example of a big renewable-plus-interconnector project in threads about nuclear costs, grid interconnects and submarine cables.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2021 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Cites ximeng · 2021-10 · on “The booming business of knitting together the world’s electricity grids”
[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.
Cites tuatoru · 2021-10 · on “Is nuclear power our best bet against climate change?”
Morocco-UK Power Project: [this video] Australian - ASEAN Power Link: [LINK] Edit: oops, now it's called Australia - Asia Power Link.
Cites thrawn0r · 2021-11 · on “Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable”
"global supply capacity of these cables is estimated at 4000 KM/p.a" [this video] seems like a bottleneck.
Cites patrickk · 2022-05 · on “Big money, nuclear subsidies, and systemic corruption (2021)”
> 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 alon