Why not pump the energy into the EU grid at bottom and pull it out in the north?
If you sell in place a and buy back in place b, you might sometimes get less of it back for the same money.
UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned
161–170 of 247 posts
Re: UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
The UK playing victim is the reason Brexit happened in the first place. No wonder their residents continue being brainwashed in that sense.
Maybe many of the residents of the UK see the creepy undemocratic bureaucracy of the EU for what it is, and it's single-speed forward into the future federal state of Europe wasn't something they wanted to be a part of. This isn't brainwashing, but people feeling more need for control and action on a local level, not their national parliaments being subsumed and subverted by Brussels, and the diverse peoples of the c…
yawn
Re: UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned
#163Editorialized title is wrong, the cable is not 10GW according to the page.
Re: UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, but does this assume Morocco won’t have a cloudy week or something (I understand that Morocco’s climate is almost always sunny, but even still)? I always assumed the threshold for “reliable renewable energy” began at a week’s worth of storage.
This project also includes wind, which doesn't require sun. "A week's worth of storage" feels somewhat like an armchair simplification. It roughly sounds on target if we're moving toward the march of nines for real-time zero-carbon power supply, but...that honestly doesn't need to be the target expectation for today. Long term goal, yes. Today's targets really should be to get to 90-95% renewable, since chasing the l…
> "A week's worth of storage" feels somewhat like an armchair simplification.
It is. The way I've heard it explained by energy experts (or people who were introduced by the media as such) was that storage needs to be on the order of days/weeks, not hours. I'm sure that's something of a crude oversimplification for a lay audience and certainly not a rugged analysis for this particular project.
> With the state of the grid today, there's lots and lots of power sources that can be replaced for cheaper and cleaner before we need to chase the long tail of 100% renewable at all hours during every season.
I'm of the impression that "clean carbon" peaker-plants are fairly inefficient because there's a fair amount of overhead in starting them and consequently they don't actually end up being that much cleaner. :/ Unfortunately, I wish I had more to offer than "this is what I've heard an alleged energy expert say". :(
Re: UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned
#165The latest Doomberg does a great job in pointing out the practical flaws. 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."
For the battery storage, perhaps they will ultimately choose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery. The cable manufacture seems like more a 'when' rather than an 'if' problem. The scheduled first phase of construction is 2025-2027, which we can reasonably expect to be delayed by 2-3 years if they are trying to build new manufacturing capability. Overall this still looks to be in the realms of possible/viable IMO.
Re: UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned
#166This is really interesting in the context of what is happening locally to my home, we are about two miles from what is planned to be the UK largest domestic solar farm [0,1]. It will output 350MW, so the one proposed in Morocco will be about 28 times the size. 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 lan…
Yes, I don't see the logic of using fertile agricultural land for solar PV. It seems like short term thinking and a planning failure. I've heard at lest one similar story regarding reforesting, i.e., a scheme that was planning to use fertile land in Wales that was ultimately canned due to local objections/resistance.
Re: UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned
#167This sounds like brexiteer project. Doubt this will actually happen. 3800 km of undersea HVDC cable just to circumvent the EU. 3800 km is the distance from St.Petersburg to Marocco.
> This sounds like brexiteer project. 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 outc…
I'm just curious if a direct interconnect from Morocco->UK is the best solution from an engineering perspective, or if a Morocco->EU->UK interconnect would work better without the politics.
Re: UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned
#168Wowsers, 200km2 of _tracking_ solar. This is an ambitious project.
Re: UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned
#169This sounds like brexiteer project. Doubt this will actually happen. 3800 km of undersea HVDC cable just to circumvent the EU. 3800 km is the distance from St.Petersburg to Marocco.
Brexit isn't mentioned anywhere and the physics of it would be the same regardless of the EU existing or not. The reason to go direct to Morocco are that transmission through regular AC grids would lose virtually all the power before it gets anywhere near the UK. 10GW is a hell of a load and you can't just pretend a grid is a bathtub at these scales. But as you brought it up, even if there was a semi-conductor breakt…
But presumably an interconnect from Morocco->Spain would free up export resources from France, which could then be exported to the UK via a shorter interconnect. Similarly, direct HVDC connections can be run overland rather than under the sea. I'm not saying these solutions are better. I'm asking how much of the current proposal is due to political constraints and how much is actually the best engineering solution given the resources available.
Re: UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah just hand over any territory anyone ever makes a weak claim to just to avoid conflict despite the wishes of the people who live there. Has your "Z" bumper sticker arrived in the mail yet?
How is the Spanish claim on Gibraltar weak? They border it, it was taken from them at gunpoint, and it's extremely dependent on Spain for services and labour.
Sharing a border isn't a claim. (France and Spain share a border - which one has a claim as a result?)
Every border is a result of "taken from them at gunpoint." (It's not hard to find folks who had large pieces of Spain taken from them at gunpoint.)
Dependency isn't a claim. It is, however, a tool for taking.