This sounds good! I don't know much about electricity, can anyone tell me if such an undersea power cable could be technically feasible between Europe and North America? Possibly taking a detour through Iceland which has significant geothermal resources.
I understand that it would take much more than just the cable between the two continents to make this work - right now there are issue on the continents themselves to get the electricity from one place to another. But with the sun shining most of the time on one of those two continents and with other (hopefully renewable) energy sources on either side of the pond, we might get to have green and cheap energy!
Morocco holds a significant chunk of the world's phosphate reserves, which are a key component of fertilizers - if they weren't a serious partner we would know that by now.
Given how well the Australian project is going (it's a long running project that's already late before even starting) I'm convinced that this project will have the same woes which comes from the mere fact of being massive long-term infrastructure projects and have nothing to do with nuclear being special.
By the way, do you know what cost the most money on the HPC project? Loan interests, by a very large margin. Because of the risk of project failure given the lack of government guarantees, they had to borrow at a baffling 9% interest rate in a world if zero interest rate. This is the insanity that drove the cost to the sky, not the engineering side of things.
The engineering side of things caused the delays though, which in turn caused cost overruns.
Anyway, in my comment I was referring to the original estimate of £22bln, which is higher than the £18bln for that HVDC project and that's disregarding inflation.
And it's like that with every nuclear power project in Europe and the US, save for the one in Belarus, though it needs to be said there were some complaints about corner-cutting there - seems to be doing fine for now, knocking on wood.
> By the way, do you know what cost the most money on the HPC project? Loan interests, by a very large margin.
That sounds very interesting, do you happen to have a source nearby? I would love to have that one in my back pocket next time i end up in a discussion on nuclear power.
> By the way, do you know what cost the most money on the HPC project? Loan interests, by a very large margin. Because of the risk of project failure given the lack of government guarantees, they had to borrow at a baffling 9% interest rate in a world if zero interest rate. This is the insanity that drove the cost to the sky, not the engineering side of things.
This is the first time I've heard of this, so I did a little digging.
> Lazard assumes investors want a return of 12% and bond holders will accept an interest payment of 8%. These are kept standard across all types of generation as the intention is not to assess the risk of the project but instead the competitiveness of the technology.
> If Hinkley was to pay these commercial rates, the project construction with interest would balloon out to close to $70b. But they didn’t and digging into EDF’s financial statements shows interest costs related to construction was only 1% of capitalised costs in 2017 and 4% in 2021.
The Finacial Times article from 2023 puts the cost increase elsewhere:
> The increase, caused by surges in material prices several billion above the most recent estimates, is nearly 80 per cent more than the cost of £18bn in 2016, when EDF first started work on the project.
And directly from the horse's mouth, in the EDF's status update from 2024:
> The costs of completing the project are now estimated at between £31 billion and £34 billion in 2015 values. The cost of civil engineering and the longer duration of the electromechanical phase (and its impact on other work) are the two main reasons for this cost revision. If the risk of an additional delay of 12 months mentioned above in the final scenario does materialise it would result in an estimated additional cost of around £1 billion in 2015 values.
The only reference to the 9% figure you mentioned comes from a BBC article from 2018
> However, Dieter Helm, professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford, told the BBC that the government shift made sense.
> "The sheer cost of building new nuclear power stations means it makes sense for the government to help finance projects like this," he said.
> "Governments can borrow much more cheaply that private companies and that lower cost of borrowing can drastically reduce the ultimate cost. Hinkley Point C would have been roughly half the cost if the government had been borrowing the money to build it at 2%, rather than EDF's cost of capital, which was 9%."
I couldn't verify it anywhere else though. Can you point to a source from the EDF that confirms the loan interests cost the most money on the Hinkley Point C project?
> Also see Figure 19 on page 65, which summarises the different financing options, ranging from 100% state, the actual HPC deal, to 100% private.
Notice how the table of different outcomes shows changes in cost to taxpayers/government, returns, and the strike price. It doesn't show changes to the total construction cost itself, which is presumably fixed no matter what the financing option is. If the grandparent comment was correct, the table would have shown a different construction cost for different financing options.
All that's different is the strike price - which makes sense.
Why would you go west to America when you have Africa below? Batteries are already cheap enough and getting cheaper that you can store 12 hours of electricity
This is totally unresearched, but my gut says it would be much higher ROI for Europe + North America to independently source solar from their respective nearby deserts, paired with batteries?
This is already in the works and secured financing recently. It’s a smaller link but it’s a start. Also Tunisia trade electricity with Libya and Algeria; so technically they could be selling electricity to Europe through that link.
The stability of any country you rely on for power is indeed a major concern.
Alas during the previous Trump presidency, Europe saw that modern Republican 'America First' thinking doesn't just call for a wall with Mexico, a travel ban with Muslim countries, and a trade war with China - it also wants a trade war with Europe.
And linking the south of Spain to the north of Morocco only needs ~200km of undersea cable, rather than the ~6000km an EU-to-US link would call for. That's a pretty big benefit.
If it’s cheaper, vastly cleaner and viable, we shouldn’t let isolationist cynicism ruin that opportunity. Without oil from the Middle East and Russia, a lot of the world would grind to halt, but most countries cannot rely on their own reserves so the isolationist angle doesn’t even come up.
Sounds like exactly what the seller of commodity X would say to me considering not buying commodity X fron them anymore when switching to something else.
I understand that it would take much more than just the cable between the two continents to make this work - right now there are issue on the continents themselves to get the electricity from one place to another. But with the sun shining most of the time on one of those two continents and with other (hopefully renewable) energy sources on either side of the pond, we might get to have green and cheap energy!