There have been public consultations this week about the plan by Xlinks to bring massive amounts of solar and wind-generated power to the UK from Morocco. The scheme promises to provide 8% of Britain’s electricity needs and to make a substantial contribution to the transition away from fossil fuels, supplying 7 million homes with clean energy. The plan, which will see underwater cables from Morocco making landfall at Abbotsham Cliffs and continuing underground to the substation at Alverdiscott, has already proved controversial. It will require the company to plan a route which involves minimum disruption to residents and disturbance to the natural environment. 

So, what has this got to do with our maritime heritage, you ask? Well, the idea of bringing vital resources into the country many hundreds of miles by sea is not a new one. As a trading nation, we have been doing this for centuries, because there are things that we can’t produce here that we want. And the interesting thing is that the sea route proposed for the cable is exactly the one that north Devonian mariners and merchants took four or five hundred years ago. 

From at least the 1400s, ships sailed out over Bideford bar, around the Lizard peninsula and down the west coast of France to bring us wine from Bordeaux and iron from Bilbao. Others continued to Lisbon and Andalusia, where they traded Barnstaple cloth for oil, fruit, dyestuffs from the Caribbean, and yes, more wine. The search for wine and sugar also took them to the Canary Islands and, beyond that, to the country then known as ‘Barbary’. Here there was a port known as Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña, now silted up and returned to desert. Here the was demand for fine cloth, ordinance and armaments, and opportunities to buy sugar, saltpetre, molasses, carpets, and cotton. 

It is exactly here that Xlinks plan to site their vast solar and wind farm, in an area of the Sahara desert nearly twice the size of the whole of Torridge which, as the consultation booklet tells you, is ‘rich in renewable energy sources’. 

Of course, there are still many searching questions to be asked about the scheme and details to be firmed up to the satisfaction of local communities. The people of Torridge must see their fair share of benefits. 

But, seeing the plan in historical context, perhaps it makes a little more sense to be exploiting our connection with the sea once again to tap resources not readily available in England. 

TT