Within five years, the world’s longest undersea cable will link Devon to a vast territory of solar panels in the Sahara Desert, supplying electricity directly into Britain’s grid at a fraction of today’s power prices.
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The future is bright, as reported by The Conversation last year:
The world’s most forbidding deserts could be the best places on Earth for harvesting solar power – the most abundant and clean source of energy we have. Deserts are spacious, relatively flat, rich in silicon – the raw material for the semiconductors from which solar cells are made — and never short of sunlight. In fact, the ten largest solar plants around the world are all located in deserts or dry regions.
Researchers imagine it might be possible to transform the world’s largest desert, the Sahara, into a giant solar farm, capable of meeting four times the world’s current energy demand. Blueprints have been drawn up for projects in Tunisia and Morocco that would supply electricity for millions of households in Europe.
Solar panels in Sahara could boost renewable energy but damage the global climate – here’s why
With a video looking at the possiblities:
What If We Covered the Sahara With Solar Panels? – YouTube
This week, the Telegraph looks at the latest from Morocco:
Within five years, the world’s longest undersea cable will link Devon to a vast territory of solar panels in the Sahara Desert, supplying electricity directly into Britain’s grid at a fraction of today’s power prices.
Sahara solar could soon rescue Britain’s broken energy system (paywall)
With more from the Elekric website today:
Subsea cable manufacturer XLCC is going to build a factory in Hunterston, Scotland, and its first output will be for the Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project. It will supply four 2,361-mile-long (3,800 km) subsea cables, with the first phase between 2025-2027 connecting wind and solar power generated in Morocco to Alverdiscott, North Devon.
The world’s longest subsea cable will send clean energy from Morocco to the UK [update]
And from the PV Magazine: