For decades, North Africa has been a key supplier of fossil fuels to Europe, with oil and gas fields pumping millions of barrels a month that power cars and heat homes from Athens to Aberdeen. Now, as European energy companies seek to cut carbon emissions, they’re looking to the region for a new source of power: solar and wind farms that would ship electricity northward via undersea cables.
Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and even the more distant United Kingdom are looking for ways to tap renewable energy from the region’s deserts. Since 1997, Spain’s grid has been linked to Morocco’s via a cable that crosses the Strait of Gibraltar, the only such connection currently in operation. But entrepreneurs and utilities across Europe are considering at least a half-dozen projects, ranging from an expansion of the Morocco-Spain cable to a 2,000-mile line departing from Morocco’s Atlantic coast and traveling to southern England. “This project will be the first of many as the world realizes the enormous benefits of transmitting electric power long distances,” says Simon Morrish, chief executive officer of Xlinks Ltd., the company planning the UK cable.
In April investors in the UK and United Arab Emirates committed £30 million ($37.6 million) to the idea, though that’s just a tiny fraction of the expected £22 billion cost for solar and wind installations and the undersea link—four separate cables running parallel to one another. Morrish says the project could be up and running by 2030, but it would require the British government to offer subsidies similar to those that benefit offshore wind in the UK. When hooked up to a giant wind and solar farm Xlinks is planning in the desert of southern Morocco, the system would have enough capacity to power about 7 million homes, helping the UK reach its target of net-zero carbon emissions from its power sector by 2035. The length of the route means it would lose about 13% of the power it carries, on top of smaller transmission losses once it lands, but Morrish says the project can be viable despite that.
Laura El-Katiri, an energy economist and visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, says it’s risky to rely on any single supplier for energy, as the Xlinks project would. She suggests it would be more robust to connect solar or wind installations in Africa more fully with the European grid, giving everyone along the way a stake in its success and security. “Doing everything alone has its costs,” El-Katiri says. “North Africa can be a great source of energy for Europe, but a single country trading with another is always different to a bloc of 26 countries trading with another.” She acknowledges, though, that the political challenges of such an idea make it tough to implement.
Although Xlinks would send power in only one direction, others are planning two-way connections, which would allow electricity to flow southward when European grids are overloaded and prices drop, giving them a market for excess power. Morocco is set to start building one such line to Portugal as soon as 2027. Egypt and Greece are discussing a cable via Cyprus, and various entrepreneurs are pushing for similar links from Tunisia and Algeria to Italy. “There are major renewable investments in Portugal and Spain, but if we open the tap, believe me, the African kilowatt-hour will be very competitive,” says Karim Choukri, a professor at the University of Hassan II in Morocco.
It makes sense to connect countries with different weather patterns, allowing them to help one another when there’s little local wind or sun. If the North Sea—where the UK has thousands of wind turbines—is calm, the weather might be sunny or blustery in Morocco. And on windy days in Italy, utilities could sell cheap surplus solar power to Tunisia, where most electricity is generated with natural gas.
The proposals offer an uneasy echo of failed attempts to harness renewable energy from the region two decades ago. In 2009, European, African and American investors founded the Desertec Foundation to build solar plants in the Sahara, but that effort foundered in the early 2010s because of high transport costs and instability following the Arab Spring. Nonetheless, tapping the region’s ample sun and wind resources makes sense, says Jack Richardson, an analyst with Onward, a think tank in London. “What you want is a diverse range of sources,” he says. “I don’t think electricity from North Africa is such a bad way to go. It’s safer to be doing that than relying on Russian energy.”
Read more: A $4 Billion Oil Pipeline Creates a Climate Dilemma for Africa
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