UK Pulls Plug on £24 Billion Desert Power Fantasy – Watts Up With That?

Charles Rotter

It comes as little surprise that yet another grandiose techno-utopian vision has ended not with a triumphant march toward Net Zero, but with a flick of the off-switch. Last week, Britain’s energy secretary quietly announced that the government “has pulled the plug on a £24 billion plan to bring Moroccan wind and solar power to Britain via the world’s longest subsea electricity cable, citing concerns over security and costs” . In other words, after years of hype, headline-grabbing simulations and talk of “reliable clean power for 19 hours a day,” the reality of risk and expense finally intruded—and the dream of Sahara sun for all has been consigned to the scrapheap.

The scheme, championed by Xlinks and backed by big-name investors from Abu Dhabi’s Taqa to TotalEnergies, was unveiled in 2022 with a headline price tag of £16 billion. By the time official talks fizzled, project costs had ballooned to between £22 billion and £24 billion—and the fixed, subsidised price for UK consumers had climbed from a promising £48/MWh in 2012 terms to a sobering £70-80/MWh, on par with Hinkley Point C’s notorious £92.50/MWh deal from a decade ago . It was a textbook illustration of how techno-optimism meets political reality: grand ambitions crashing headlong into the twin walls of finance and geopolitics.

Perhaps the most telling line came when officials admitted this “first-of-a-kind mega project” carried “a high level of inherent, cumulative risk, delivery, operational, and security.” In plainer terms, nobody quite trusted a 3,800-mile subsea cable stretching from the Sahara to Devon to keep the lights on—or to fend off hostile actors, accidental damage or simple technical failure . For all the talk of homegrown power, the reality was a foreign-built supergrid running through disputed waters, vulnerable to every storm, saboteur or bureaucratic blunder.

And yet just a few years ago, this venture was presented as the ultimate win-win: millions of desert acres covered in solar panels and wind turbines, exporting 3.6 GW of “reliable” energy to 7 million homes and displacing imported gas. Xlinks even claimed it could reduce UK wholesale prices by over 9 percent in its first year of operation—implying that the very costs of this colossal scheme would pay for itself. Leave aside the challenge of storing or transmitting intermittent deserts-of-power and the gargantuan batteries needed to smooth out every dust storm, and one must ask: who was really buying into this fairy tale—investors or ideologues?

No doubt Sir Dave Lewis, Xlinks’s chairman and former Tesco boss, felt the sting of rejection when he spoke of being “hugely surprised and bitterly disappointed.” It is, after all, hard to maintain the sheen of global-scale green enthusiasm when home departments balk at underwriting your vision. One can almost hear the collective shrug from Westminster: enough with offshore daydreams—build some turbines in Yorkshire, drill holes for storage in the Midlands, train some electricians in Glasgow and call it a day. For all the vaunted “diversity of supply,” it appears domestic alternatives won the argument over exotic imports.

There is a delicious irony in the timing. As ministers tout an “accelerated path to net zero at least risk to billpayers and taxpayers,” they have effectively walked away from the single largest overseas renewable venture ever proposed . The very same people who once celebrated cross-continental cables as the crowning achievement of global cooperation now invoke security concerns and “national interest” as their exit ramp. One wonders how abruptly the narrative will shift next time a British-funded project in Kazakhstan or Canada hits a bump—will it be “not in the British interest” to proceed with those, too?

This turn of events also exposes the fundamental flaw of top-down climate technocracy: it treats citizens as passive units in a planetary control scheme, not discerning voters with budgets to balance. When the public wises up to the fact that imported Sahara sun arrives at a price rivaling home-grown nuclear—and carries with it a risk of outages, sabotage or diplomatic spats—they recoil. They learn that the cable would thread through multiple jurisdictions, remote islands and fierce currents, any one of which could jeopardize supply. At some point, scepticism ceases to be a political liability and becomes simple common sense.

Consider the broader lesson: no matter how enthusiastically globalists embrace “interconnected grids,” the strings always end back at national treasuries and war-rooms. The cable’s 1,500 square-mile solar-wind-battery complex in Morocco was to be the crown jewel of decarbonization, yet it was contingent on political goodwill in Rabat, cable-manufacturing in Asia, local security in the Sahara and stable undersea trench conditions for 3,800 miles—any of which could unravel faster than a hastily signed bilateral MoU. The government’s conclusion that “stronger alternative options” exist closer to home may be the most uncontroversial statement of 2025 .

Detach for a moment from the partisan fray and savour the schadenfreude: this megaproject was touted as the elixir to Britain’s energy woes, yet it collapsed under its own hubris. The very proponents who decried fossil-fuel inertia now cry foul when asked to stump up real money. The same voices that demand “global solidarity” balk when that solidarity requires underwriting risks in unstable deserts. And as for “green jobs” and “supply-chain opportunities”—it turns out that Asia still makes the cables and Morocco still controls the sun.

The demise of Xlinks’s Sahara venture may not end the net-zero narrative, but it does puncture a hole in the myth of techno-utopian inevitability. When a scheme promising 8 percent of Britain’s electricity—at a price echoing nuclear—and requiring unprecedented security guarantees is deemed “not in the national interest,” one must wonder: how many more exotic grand plans will be ditched before realism returns? The answer, for now, seems to be one.

Let us not pretend this was a minor failure. It represented the epitome of climate-policy excess: outsourcing critical infrastructure to distant deserts, bemoaning gas-price volatility while embracing solar-dust storms, and swapping local accountability for a vague vision of interconnected utopia. Watching it crumble offers a rare moment of clarity amid the Net Zero hysteria: true energy security still resides in domestic control, not pipelines and cables stretching half-a-continent away.

In the aftermath, expect Xlinks to regroup, rebrand and regroup again—perhaps pitching Canadian hydro next. But the core lesson stands: citizens will not subsidise fantasy-grid fantasies when they can invest in less risky generation at home. And bureaucrats will not ignore security and cost overruns when climate dogma collides with the hard calculus of budgets and ballots.

There is an understated joy in witnessing this particular techno-dream deflate. It reminds us that even the most elaborate green schemes are only as sound as their financial footings and geopolitical foundations. When those falter, the utopian narrative gives way to something far more earthy: the simple recognition that expensive, complex, and foreign-dependent projects rarely survive contact with reality. As the Sahara sun fades—quite literally—from policymakers’ agendas, one hopes the next set of proposals will be a little more modest, a bit less global, and anchored firmly within UK borders.

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