Morocco To Send Solar Power To Germany Via 4800 Km Undersea Cable – CleanTechnica

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Morocco has abundant sunshine, but no oil or methane reserves, which means historically it has had to import most of the energy the country needs. Starting about 15 years ago, the government of Morocco decided to leverage its ability to create solar and wind power to reduce the amount of money flowing out of the country to purchase fossil fuels.

That initiative has been going well. Today, about a quarter of the electrical energy the country needs comes from renewables, including the Ouarzazate Solar Power Station, the world’s largest concentrated solar power facility. That $9 billion installation generates 510 MW of power and includes another 72 MW from a conventional solar farm within its 12 square mile footprint. The country expects to get more than half of its electricity from renewables by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050.

There was a plan to export electricity from Morocco to the UK, but those discussions have ended. Now a new plan has emerged, one that would deliver electricity from Morocco to Germany via a 4,800 km long undersea cable that would run along the coasts of Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands before connecting at several points to the German electrical grid.

Morocco To Germany

According to Morocco World  News, that venture, called Sila Atlantik, will be able to deliver 26 TWh of clean electricity annually — about five percent of Germany’s current power consumption. The technical specifications include two parallel submarine cables with a combined capacity of 3.6 gigawatts. Although, reports suggest it has the potential to scale up to 15 gigawatts as demand increases.

The Sila Atlantik venture will be led by energy industry veterans from EnBW and Orsted and will be owned and operated by X-Links Germany GmbH. The project has reportedly attracted attention from major energy corporations, including Eon, Uniper, and potentially Octopus Energy. It is projected to cost up to €40 billion, a sum that will require governmental guarantees.

According to EcoMENA, in 2009, several companies formed the Desertec Industrial Initiative. Participants included E.ON, Munich Re, Siemens, and Deutsche Bank, all of which were shareholders in the organization. It was formed as a largely German-led private sector initiative with the aim of translating the Desertec concept into a profitable business project. The expectation was that by 2050 the consortium would provide about 20 percent of Europe’s electricity by leveraging the output of a vast network of solar and wind installations that spanned the entire Middle East and North Africa region.

Those renewable energy resources would be connected to continental Europe via special high-voltage, direct-current transmission cables. The estimated cost of the Desertec proposal was €400 billion. The proposal collapsed due to insurmountable financial hurdles and political headwinds. Sila Atlantik now believes the timing is right — mostly because the cost of installing renewables has dropped sharply since then.

In addition, breakthroughs in HVDC transmission technology have occurred since the Desertec proposal foundered. The deployment of state of the art, direct-current undersea cables makes transporting electricity with minimal transmission losses possible while circumventing the community opposition that often plagues land-based power line construction.

Benefits For Germans

For German consumers, the project offers five significant benefits:

• reduced electricity costs through increased supply
• diminished carbon emissions
• lower network infrastructure expenses due to Morocco’s reliable renewable generation patterns
• enhanced power delivery to energy hungry southern Germany
• expanded capacity for power-intensive industries, particularly artificial intelligence data centers that threaten to strain Germany’s grid resources

The Sila Atlantik trademark registration was officially filed with the German Patent and Trademark Office on January 31 and receiving formal approval on May 5 — a strategic milestone demonstrating the project’s momentum and long-term vision.

However, major challenges remain. Government guarantees could lead to potential taxpayer exposure. Political reliance on Morocco introduces geopolitical vulnerabilities, while coordinating permits across five coastal countries adds layers of complexity.

Manufacturing constraints pose additional hurdles. The specialized high-performance cables are in short supply globally, so Sila Atlantik is considering a dedicated production facility in Morocco. According to the most ambitious project timelines, initial electricity transmission could commence by 2034, with the system reaching full capacity before 2040.

What Does Morocco Get?

With Sila Atlantik, Morocco could position itself at the epicenter of Europe’s energy transition, potentially establishing a direct conduit between the Sahara’s vast renewable resources and German industrial powerhouses. Morocco World News says the realization of a transcontinental energy bridge depends on sustained political will, diplomatic coordination, and technological execution across multiple fronts in the coming decade. That’s a tall order in a world that seems to be getting less stable politically rather than more so.

In a 2023 blog post about Desertec, Hamza Hamouchene had this to say:

“It is within this context of pro-corporate trade deals and a scramble for influence and energy resources that we should understand the Desertec project…. [It] could play a role in diversifying energy sources away from Russia as well as contributing to EU targets of reducing carbon emissions. And what better region to achieve these aims than MENA, an area well endowed with natural resources, from fossil fuels to sun and wind.

“It seems that a familiar ‘colonial’ scheme is being rolled in front of our eyes — the unrestricted flow of cheap natural resources from the Global South to the rich industrialized North, maintaining a profoundly unjust international division of labor. This is a genuine concern given the language used in different articles and publications describing the potential of the Sahara in powering the whole world.

“The Sahara is described as a vast empty land, sparsely populated; constituting a golden opportunity to provide Europe with electricity so it can continue its extravagant consumerist lifestyle and profligate energy consumption. This is the same language used by colonial powers to justify their civilizing mission and, as an African myself, I cannot help but be very suspicious of such mega-projects and their ‘well-intentioned’ motives that are often sugar coating brutal exploitation and sheer robbery.

“Such sentiments were also raised by Daniel Ayuk Mbi Egbe of the African Network for Solar Energy in 2011. ‘Many Africans are skeptical about Desertec,’ he said. ‘Europeans make promises, but at the end of the day, they bring their engineers, they bring their equipment, and they go. It’s a new form of resource exploitation, just like in the past.’”

At CleanTechnica, we tend to gush about any renewable energy news — especially today when the US government has put many clean energy projects in a deep freeze. Although some readers balk when we discuss politics in our stories, political considerations are almost always involved in any discussion about clean energy.

That’s especially true now that the US government is aggressively hostile to clean energy technologies and is pressuring other nations to burn more fossil fuels. Providing clean energy to the world is of vital concern, but so is social justice. Things are seldom as straightforward as they seem.