By Paul Homewood
Give us £25 billion, or we’ll go overseas!
The Telegraph report:
Britain risks missing out on a pioneering £25bn green energy project because of ministerial dithering, one of the country’s most prominent business figures has warned.
Sir Dave Lewis, the former Tesco boss spearheading an audacious plan to power millions of UK homes with cheap solar and wind power from Morocco, has warned that prolonged bureaucracy could derail a scheme that promises to lower household bills, slash emissions and create thousands of jobs.
As chairman of X-Links, the company behind the project, he warned that “international investors won’t wait forever”.
Sir Dave said “there are people lining up and down the street” to provide the £8bn of funding needed, and when the company recently tested the debt markets for the remaining £17bn of financing, it was “significantly oversubscribed”, he added.
However, X-Links could decide to take the project to another country amid growing frustration over the time it is taking to get the green light from the Government, he claimed.
Under the company’s plans, solar and wind power generated in Morocco’s Saharan Tan-Tan region will be transported at hyper speed through 4,000km of hi-tech underwater cables to the Devon coast in less than a second.
Read the full story here.
According to the Telegraph, X-Links are looking for a CfD strike price similar to offshore wind, ie around £84/MWh.
Rated at 11.5 GW, the project would supply about 20 TWh a year, 8% of UK demand, equivalent to a couple of medium size CCGTs, so £25 billion is certainly not cheap!
The question needs asking – if Lewis reckons that investors are queuing up to throw billions at this scheme, there must be excess profits to be made. Let them build their solar farm and interconnector without a subsidised CfD and take their chances on the open market.
It certainly seems to me that it would be unjustifiably risky to rely on power from North Africa, with all the terrorist threats about. It would also be foolhardy relying on an undersea cable to this extent as well.
By all means, let them build it. But that should not replace the necessity of building up the resilience of our own energy provision, which must include a full fleet of dispatchable generators.
There is one more issue. What happens in ten or fifteen years time, when the solar panels and batteries are at end of life? Do we go cap in hand to China to replace them? Will X-Links have us over a barrel, knowing we have burnt our bridges?