The story of a Moroccan wind and solar farm the size of Greater London providing energy for a country thousands of miles away would ordinarily be the preserve of sci-fi books. But Xlinks founder Simon Morrish tells Ali Lyon that the only thing stopping it from becoming a reality is the UK’s snail-paced state.
Simon Morrish is barely a minute into his interview with City AM, and he has already launched into an anecdote about the unusual conversation he’d strike up as a youngster during dates.
“On a very first date”, he says, recalling one rendezvous with a member of the opposite sex, “I brought up an idea I had as a teenager, envisaging putting mirrors in the desert, beaming them up into space to a satellite and back down to colder climates to help with planting and all sorts of things like that.
“So I’ve always had significant ideas.”
Little came of his far-fetched solar-beam farming contraption beyond its function as an unorthodox chat-up line, but Morrish’s capacity to think big has endured. Indeed, his latest idea, an energy venture called Xlinks, sounds even more outlandish than his teenage farm tech fancy.
Morrish wants to build a solar and wind farm in the little-known Moroccan region of Guelmim-Oued, which is the size of Greater London.
And that – believe it or not – is the simple bit. Xlinks then wants to funnel that vast amount of energy through two pairs of cables up the Atlantic coast of Portugal, around Spain and France, to eventually surface 2,360 miles away from its source in the sleepy Devonian village of Alverdiscott. There, it would plug into the UK’s energy mix, becoming a core part of our laudably green but disastrously under-supplied grid.
The planned route of Xlinks’ sub-sea cables (Credit: Xlinks)
“It sounds crazy,” Morrish admits. “But the economics just stack up.”
The reason for the conviction shown by Xlinks’ founder, a qualified engineer with stints at Morgan Stanley and, “for [his] sins”, McKinsey under his belt, is the enormous bounty that lies at the end of the project, should it become fully operational.
All in all, the mad-cap scheme promises to produce 11.5 gigawatts of energy for the UK’s grid. That – in layman’s terms – is eight per cent of the country’s entire energy demand, with the added bonus of bringing down energy prices by 9.3 per cent in its first year alone – all from clean, renewable and, crucially, consistent sources.
“What we do, is solve the whole intermittency problems of renewables,” he says. “Renewables are already much, much cheaper than fossil fuels, but – and we see this [in the UK] – that intermittency causes all sorts of issues.”
It’s just just Britain that suffers from the scourge of inconsistent supply. The world’s other renewable powerhouses – Denmark, the Netherlands, even the US – all grapple with the inexorable downside of domestic clean energy. In the UK, when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, our grid is flooded with energy, pushing down prices. Just a few days later, however, we can find ourselves paying above the odds for emergency power when our meteorological systems aren’t playing ball.
The Germans – ever the innovative linguists – have even coined a word for when weather is still, grey and thus unobliging: Dunkelflaute.
The magic of Guelmim-Oued Noun, and indeed much of Northern Africa, is that Dunkelflaute is not an issue. This means Xlinks could theoretically provide these gargantuan volumes of energy at a consistency and scale which our own onshore and offshore wind projects and divisive solar farms could only dream of.
It is even, Morrish claims, more financially palatable than the other clean source that renewable energy sceptics are heralding as a potential silver bullet to the UK’s energy woes: nuclear. “We are providing power to the UK that is as valuable – or more valuable – to the grid than nuclear. It’s less than two thirds of the cost of nuclear. And it can be built in less than half the time.”
Xlinks: A who’s who of industry heavyweights
Morrish’s enthusiasm for the scheme’s potential to “really move the needle” on the UK’s economic and environmental priorities is not just a weapon in media interviews. It has also allowed Xlinks to amass a phalanx of backers and directors that would be the envy of any clean energy start-up.
Greg Jackson, the founder of Octopus energy, is a non-executive director for Xlinks Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Its chair is Sir Dave Lewis – the former boss of Tesco and, in Morrish’s eyes, “just an incredible business leader”. Other board members include Octopus Energy’s Greg Jackson – “such a visionary, but one that gets stuff delivered” – former managing partner of McKinsey Sir Ian Davis – “he’s been fabulous, and believes we could be the next BP” – and ACWA Power chief executive Paddy Padmanathan, also known, Morrish reliably informs your reporter, as the “Usain Bolt of solar”.
This Harlem Globetrotters of the energy and business ecosystem – none of whom receive a board fee – has helped Xlinks to attract correspondingly weighty financial backing. Total Energies, Jackson’s Octopus Energy and Abu Dhabi’s state energy company TAQA have all lined up to funnel development funding into the scheme.
“We’ve been very fortunate,” Morrish says, when asked how he coaxed such an enviable talent roster to back his audacious project. “But give me luck over intelligence any day, and I do think – with people like that – they’re drawn to the vision, to doing something important.”
Xlinks’ battle with bureaucracy
But even with captains of industry as experienced and battle-hardened as Lewis, Jackson and Davis onside – Xlinks has a problem. One that emanates from the body that will determine its financial sustainability: the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), and its languid approach to rubber stamping the project.
It is clear the ministry’s propensity for delay and deliberation is fast becoming a bête noire of Morrish’s, a man so restless and impatient that he found himself frustrated even by McKinsey’s pace of delivery: “I actually wanted to get stuff done.”
His frustrations are compounded by the fact that Xlinks is not even asking for any handouts or subsidies. Instead, the catalyst that Morrish and his colleagues need from the Ed Miliband-run department is what’s known as a ‘contract for difference’ (CfD) that will guarantee a certain price for the energy it produces.
Having that CfD is mission-critical. Not only would it allow Morrish to plough ahead in the knowledge Xlinks will get a guaranteed price for the energy it produces but – even more important – almost all of the private capital on which the ambitious project relies is contingent on that price guarantee being in place.
Put bluntly, Xlinks securing the CfD would unlock £24bn of investment almost overnight. But in the contract’s absence, every week that passes means the project remains in aspic, burning through early-stage investor cash with next to no indication of when or if they can expect this all-important endorsement from the government.
Energy secretary Ed Miliband has previously said Xlinks is a project his “department will want to consider” (Photo by Oli Scarff – WPA Pool/Getty Images)
The predicament – which if not rectified soon means the firm’s ambitious early 2030s delivery date “may be pushed back” – is evidently getting under the skin of the usually composed founder.
“This is the biggest no-brainer and easiest decision for a government minister to make that I’ve seen,” he says. “Talk to someone like Sir Dave – or anyone that’s run a business, and you need to make big decisions daily. When you’re in government, there doesn’t seem to be that urgency.”
Morrish says DESNZ has engaged well, but despite the project ostensibly ticking “all their boxes,” movement from our unwieldy state is “still too slow.”
The founder readily admits that the world of government relations and lobbying was “completely foreign” to him before starting Xlinks. Indeed, its unfamiliarity was partly why he went to such lengths to attract Lewis to the firm’s ranks over socially distanced walks in Richmond Park during the pandemic.
But he has quickly realised that this unfamiliar arm of corporate affairs is now the most important for his firm’s prospects and has carefully honed his messaging accordingly.
“If I was to bump into Keir Starmer in a lift,” he tells City AM. “I would say, ‘This absolutely helps solve so many of your key priorities of this government: growth, net zero, bringing down energy costs, all at no cost to you as a government. We need full support and full steam ahead.’”
It would take a brave soul to bet against Morrish – a man whose adult life has been characterised by successfully convincing the likes of Lewis, Jackson and Total Energies boss Patrick Pouyanné of the merits of his vision – chalking up another supporter in the shape of the Prime Minister.
Even his impractical teenage dream of beaming nourishing solar rays to inhospitable climates served a purpose of sorts.
While it may have never got off the ground, the young woman he was regaling of its merits made an even bigger commitment than any contract for difference or billion-pound financial commitment, when she agreed to be his wife.