Plan to bring 15GW of desert wind and solar power to Germany
Group of former EnBW and Orsted executives reportedly plans 4,800-kilometre cable along Atlantic coast linked to green power in Morocco
A group of German energy sector veterans, including former Orsted and EnBW executives, plans to build a 4,800-kilometre interconnector to transport electricity from 15GW of wind and solar farms in the Sahara to Germany.
The plan reportedly counts on the backing of large utilities such as E.On, Uniper and Octopus Energy, with talks with Germany’s economics and energy ministry said to be ongoing.
The transmission cable for Sila Atlantic would pass along the coasts of Morocco, the Iberian Peninsula, France and Belgium to end up in Germany.
This would make it one of the longest interconnector projects globally, and potentially the longest subsea. There is a 5,100km plan to transmit Australian wind and solar power to Singapore, but 800km of that project would be on land.
A similar plan to transmit large volumes of renewable power from Morocco to the UK – XLinks – was recently discontinued, as were ideas in the wake of the Desertec initiative in the last decade to ship vast amounts of mostly solar power via the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe.
Both E.On and Germany’s energy minister are quoted as saying that it is too early to answer details about the massive plan.
Solar irradiation levels in Morocco are far higher than in cloudy Germany, while the country also has stong wind resource along its coast.
The green power would be transmitted via two parallel high voltage direct current (HVDC) lines that have already been included in the 10-year development plan of European power grid federation Entso-E and cost €14.5bn ($17.2 bn), the newspaper reported.