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Comment by dncornholio | Hacker News Reader

Always thought this wouldn't be viable because of transportation. Is this a solved problem?

I know that Norway has subsea power cables to various European countries. Apparently the North Sea Link[1] which came online in 2021, is the longest such cable in the world at 750 km.

Drawing a 750 km line from the coast of Morocco I can almost reach Barcelona, Spain. With perhaps some advances, and including the distance of the branching network, I think reaching "enough" of European power consumption is doable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Link

edit: actually, looking at terrestrial interconnectors the record is much farther already, 2210 km between Hami and Zhengzhou in China.[2]

Coincidentally, Wikipedia mentions that the longest proposed cable is in fact the Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project[3], which the Washington Post article failed to mention. At 3,800 km, the power losses would apparently amount to 13%.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interconnector [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco-UK_Power_Projec...

I believe the North Sea Link is specifically the longest undersea cable, not the longest transmission line; a more direct route could be taken across the Strait of Gibraltar with further transmission on land. For the purposes of argument, Ceuta to Algeciras would be connecting two parts of Spain and is only 30km across the strait.

You're right - I just updated my comment with some terrestrial cable info as you posted this.

HVDC makes long distance transmission viable, and long links already exist: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1305820/longest-power-tr... (The direct distance between eg Paris and Ouarzazate is 2100km for reference.)

There's a proposal to link the UK to Morocco directly with a 3800km cable: https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/

A private scheme in Australia (Sun Cable/PowerLink) was looking at connecting Australia to Singapore via a 4500km cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link (It fell apart due to commercial issues rather than technical/engineering ones from what I'm aware.)

The technology exists to do fairly efficient long distance transmission like that. Europe is small. It could work.

Is it cheaper than putting the solar closer? Don’t know. It would be more consistent, which is a big deal with solar. That alone can compensate for a lot of inefficiency.

A High Voltage DC cable from Morocco to the UK is estimated to have under 10% power loss.

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