General – New Cable-Layer
A British renewable-power company is on track to order a cable-lay vessel for installation of one of the world’s longest subsea power cable projects.
The Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project will be among longest power transmission links in the world, thanks to a circuitous route that hugs the coastlines of Portugal, Spain and France.
The project requires four parallel HVDC cables to carry about 3.6 GW of power capacity in two 1.8 GW links. With a route length of 2,500 miles, the total length of wire comes to about 10,000 miles.
The power will come from an 11.5 GW solar/wind project in Morocco, buffered by a 22 GWh battery storage bank. The concept is to provide dispatchable power for up to eight percent of the UK’s electricity demand, filling in gaps in Britain’s local wind and solar generation.
A sister company, XLCC, is building a cable manufacturing plant in Scotland to create the massive quantities of HVDC cable required for the project.
The same firm is planning to order a cable-layer with the capacity to install it, and the award to build it is expected later this year. It will be one of the largest vessels of its kind, and will be able to deploy two cables at a time as a bundled pair.
In addition to deploying it for XLinks, XLCC plans to charter the vessel out to other developers on the global market.
