I've been talking a lot about energy storage recently mostly in the forms of various
competing battery chemistries but also in some other more imaginative technologies
like molten salt, hot rocks, liquid air, and even your hot water tank at home.
Energy storage is, and will continue to be an absolutely crucial factor in the mass adoption
of intermittent renewable power sources like wind and solar. After all we've all heard the
old cliche that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow haven't we?
But that cliche only really holds true if your horizons are strictly limited to...
well the horizon. If you're prepared to step outside your own sphere of existence then a whole
kaleidoscope of possibilities suddenly comes into focus. And you don't need hallucinogenic drugs
for the trip either, it can be achieved by the simple expedient of taking a look at an atlas.
Because of course in reality the sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing
somewhere on planet earth 24 hours a day 365 days a year. So if there was a way of sending the power
from the sun and the wind instantaneously from wherever it's happening at any given moment
to wherever it's needed at that precise time then we'd effectively have ourselves a network
of global base load renewable energy. Now if that all sounds a bit 'Star Trek' to you then
think again because that's precisely the kind of infrastructure that's already being developed
to move energy between east and west and from mid-latitude regions up to the northern hemisphere
where 90 percent of the human species lives and works. One of the most ambitious of those
projects has just been unveiled by a UK company called Xlinks, and it looks set to
blaze a trail for a revolution in the way we operate the electricity grids of the future.
Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. Moving very large quantities of electricity over very
long distances through high voltage direct current or HVDC cables is not a new concept.
There's been a high voltage cable running from the pacific northwest down to Los Angeles for decades.
There are several in Europe and Asia, and of course there's the monster one-point-one million
volt Changji Guquan project carrying twelve thousand megawatts of power
over three thousand kilometers from the wind and solar farms in the northwest of China
to the urban conurbations on the country's east coast supplying more than 26 million people
with electricity. So the technology is well used and well proven, but few projects match
the scale and scope of the infrastructure that X-links are currently putting together.
It's called the Morocco- UK power project and to borrow a strap line from an old tv commercial,
it'll do exactly what it says on the tin! That means harnessing the reliable daily sunshine and
wind that hits South Morocco 365 days a year and sending it into the UK electricity grid
via massive subsea HVDC cables. Morocco is already aggressively pursuing its own transition
to a grid supplied by renewables. In a recent web chat the founder and CEO of Xlinks,
Simon Morrish explained to me that he and his team were acutely conscious of this vital ongoing work
so they liaised very closely with the Moroccan government to ensure they didn't use any land
that may otherwise have been allocated for use by the local population for their own energy needs.
Nevertheless the site they've secured covers approximately 1,500 square kilometers or about 580
square miles. That's an area the size of London, which for a wind and solar farm is enormous.
But you could easily fit the lower 48 states of America within the borders of the Sahara
desert and still have plenty of room left over so in that context the footprint of the Morocco-
UK power plant is actually fairly negligible. What it'll provide though is space to install
seven gigawatts of solar PV panels plus 3.5 gigawatts of wind power and a 5 gigawatt,
twenty gigawatt hour battery energy storage facility. Those are some pretty huge numbers!
When complete the site will provide enough power for more than seven million homes
representing eight percent of the electricity demand via two 1.8 gigawatt grid connections
that have already been approved by the UK national grid for installation on the North Devon
coast. The solar PV power element of the Morocco site is fairly self-explanatory I suppose - you
get sunshine every day for more or less the same amount of time every day throughout the whole year
without the daily and seasonal intermittency that we have to put up with in more northern climes.
What may not be quite so intuitive though is the potential of wind power in the same location. It
turns out that the convection currents caused by the sun's movement across the desert sky
during the day cause quite significant and predictable winds to pick up in the late afternoon
and those winds keep blowing all the way into the late evening and night time. That's perfect timing
to keep the electrons flowing after the sun's gone down but it also beautifully matches the high
demand sprites of the UK grid as everyone comes home from work and puts the kettle on. In fact the
wind capacity factor at the site- which is how the industry assesses location feasibility- is 55%.
That compares very favourably to the 40% capacity factor that the UK's offshore wind farms achieve.
The on-site battery storage facility acts like a kind of massive control box to regulate the supply
at the right frequency throughout the hours of darkness reaching a state of full discharge just
as the sun comes up each morning. All told the facility will be producing at a capacity
of 3.6 gigawatts for an average of 20 hours a day. Effectively what you've got here is precisely
the kind of base load power from renewables that really would have seemed like science fiction just
a few years ago. The combination of generation options also optimizes the carrying capacity
of the HVDC cables. The precise calculations for establishing cable load factors involve quite a
lot of complicated variables that are outside the scope of this video but in round figures
the solar PV panels just on their own provide a load factor on the cables of just over 40 percent.
Adding wind power bumps that number up to around 70 percent and then when you include
the battery storage the load factor gets close to 85 percent. But manufacturing those enormous
cables has arguably turned out to be one of the biggest challenges of the entire project.
The overall distance they'll need to cover is 3 800 kilometers, but to ensure security of supply
there'll be four cables in total. That's a total of fifteen thousand two hundred kilometers. Global
production capacity of this kind of monster cable is estimated to be something in the
region of four thousand kilometers a year so Xlinks would require the entire world supply
every year for four years. And guess what... the entire world supply is unsurprisingly already
allocated to other projects. So if they were going to source the kit from existing manufacturers,
Xlinks would be facing high prices and lead times of at least five years.
A plant definition study commissioned from a company that specialises in building cable
extrusion factories revealed that it would be more cost effective for X-links to set up their
own production facility from scratch and build the HVDC cables themselves.
So they began looking for appropriate sites in coastal locations around the UK,
and they found just the spot up at Hunterston on the west coast of Scotland where an existing
nuclear power plant is due to close in 2023 with the loss of 500 jobs. Xlinks plan to build a new
six-line cable extrusion factory on a nearby site that'll become the largest cable manufacturing
facility in the world creating 900 well-paid high-tech manufacturing jobs hopefully absorbing
many of the 500 redundancies from the power plant. All in, Xlinks projects to reach an overall cost
of electricity of 48 pounds per megawatt-hour which is the price they're aiming to secure in
the UK government's contracts for difference or CFD scheme. CFDs are long-term contracts
between a government and electricity generators that allow the generator to stabilize their
revenue at a pre-agreed level known as the strike price for the entire duration of the contract.
When the market price for electricity falls below the strike price set out in the contract
the CFD scheme operator makes up the difference in payments to the generator and when the market
price is above the strike price the generator pays that difference back to the scheme operator.
UK offshore wind for example has a CFD cost of 40 pounds per megawatt hour. now if you were a
minister in the UK government's Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy,
you might be tempted to compare the 40 pound cost of offshore wind to the 48 pound projected
cost of Xlink's wind and solar and come to the conclusion that you'd be better off sticking
with the cheaper option. But that would be to overlook the critical difference between
the two technologies. UK offshore wind remains a very intermittent source of power generation
and without wishing to blow your mind too much that actually creates an unhelpful contortion
of the CFD scheme. When there's loads of wind and the turbines are producing their peak output,
electricity prices drop which means the offshore wind generators are getting money from the CFD
scheme to guarantee their 40 pound contract price. But when there's no wind and consequently less
electricity is being generated then market prices tend to go up, often above the strike
price of 40 pounds. But because the offshore wind generators are not actually producing very
much electricity at those times there's very little for them to pay back to the CFD scheme
operator. Effectively that's a subsidy that can only be enjoyed by an intermittent power source.
By contrast the Xlinks project will provide reliable base load power,
so they'll most likely be a significant net contributor to the coffers of the UK
exchequer which makes them an unsubsidized power source at 48 pounds per megawatt hour.
Arguably then, a much more appropriate comparison should be with other base load power generation
facilities currently being built in the UK, like the Hinckley Point C nuclear reactor for example.
Hinckley has secured a CFD price of £92.50 per megawatt hour - nearly twice as much
as the Moroccan facility. In that context Xlinks starts to look like extremely good value indeed.
Those negotiations are ongoing and are being led by Xlink's Exec Chair Sir Dave Lewis,
who UK viewers may recognise as the ex-chief executive of our largest supermarket chain Tesco.
Meanwhile back in Morocco, Xlinks is making progress in gaining the requisite regulatory
and government approvals so that the country can benefit from the 10,000 jobs that will be
created during the construction of the facility, 2,000 of which will become permanent positions.
The total cost of the project, including the new cable extrusion factory,
is 16 billion pounds with 40 million pounds already secured for the development phase.
Construction is due to commence in 2025 with the first system scheduled to go online in 2027.
The Morocco-UK power project is probably pushing the boundaries
of what's been achieved to date and I'm sure there are those who quite understandably argue
that we should be focusing far more on distributed energy solutions and be less reliant on large
centralized facilities like this one. As an owner of rooftop solar panels myself I'd certainly agree
that those distributed energy generation sources will play an absolutely vital role
in the transition to a more sustainable future, but here in the UK we now have only 14 years left
to achieve a mandated 100% net zero carbon electricity grid.
There's a lot of nuclear and gas power due to come offline in the coming years and despite the fine
words of our current government it's difficult to see a legitimate solution for base load energy
in the short term without projects like Xlinks. The new nuclear power plants currently under
construction are taking far too long and are catastrophically over budget, and even the small
modular reactors being developed by Rolls-Royce won't be online until 2035 at the very earliest,
so right now the case for base load renewables via long distance HVDC cables looks pretty compelling.
No doubt there'll be plenty of you folks out there who have strong views on these kinds of
projects one way or the other so if you do then why not jump down to the comment section below
and share your thoughts there. That's it for this week though. As always a big thank
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