Australian billionaire plots green energy revolution with power link to North Africa

Telegraph

07-05-2025

An Australian mining billionaire is seeking support from Ed Miliband for a new multibillion-pound power link between Europe and North Africa.
Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest, the founder and boss of iron ore giant Fortescue, has held discussions with the Energy Secretary in recent weeks about the project, which would aim to pipe clean energy generated from African solar farms to the European Continent.
Fortescue wants to develop up to 100 gigawatts (GW) of clean power capacity in North Africa, with talks ongoing with various European governments about running multiple subsea cables alongside one another to bring over electricity.
These would be able to transport up to 500 terrawatt hours (TWh) of electricity per year, roughly equivalent to Germany's entire annual consumption or 17 Hinkley Point C-sized nuclear power stations operating round the clock.
It would be backed up by battery storage and potentially hydrogen-fired power plants, ensuring the proposed interconnector could provide round-the-clock supplies and potentially support for system stability as well.
Fortescue has yet to confirm the interconnector's route but it is understood that power for Britain would be transported via other intermediary Western European countries.
The mining company last year signed a deal with Belgium-based offshore cable maker Jan de Nul to look at potential manufacturing facilities in Morocco.
It is the latest business to look at tapping the vast solar power of North Africa, with a £25bn project proposed by rival Xlinks also vying for support from the Government.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Forrest said: 'You've got the most impossible amount of energy being wasted every single day in North Africa right now, so we're developing a proposal to send the equivalent of 500TW to Europe.
'And I really want to stress, this is not intermittent. It would be 24/7, baseload power, just like what I need to run my company.
'It can't run on wind and solar going up and down, it can't stop for Christmas, it can't stop for Easter. It has to go every second of every day.
'That's when we need power, and that's when Britain and Europe do as well.'
Mr Forrest founded Fortescue in 2003 and built it into one of the world's biggest iron ore producers. But following a near-death experience in 2016, he became involved in environmentalism and vowed to transform his company into a green energy champion.
He has argued his interconnector scheme can help to cut the power bills of European households and businesses while improving grid stability.
The billionaire insisted he was not seeking subsidies from the Government but wanted a deal that would commit the UK to buying electricity at market prices over a set period of time.
'I want Ed [Miliband] to say, 'we'll buy X at market [prices],'' he said.
By comparison, the rival scheme proposed by Xlinks, which is backed by former Tesco boss Sir Dave Lewis, is seeking a so-called contract for difference which would guarantee the project a fixed 'strike price' for the power it supplies.
The Xlinks cable would transport solar and wind power generated in Morocco's Saharan Tan-Tan region to the Devon coast, via 4,000km of underwater cables.
Mr Miliband has pledged to cut household energy bills by £300 a year and make Britain's electricity system 95pc 'clean' by 2030.
His target includes increasing the capacity of interconnectors linked to the UK from 10GW currently to up to 14GW.
Iberian blackouts
The Fortescue proposal has emerged just weeks after Spain and Portugal suffered unprecedented national blackouts, with electricity grid stability now high on the agenda.
Some experts have raised concerns that cascading failures in the Spanish system, the cause of which are still unknown, may have been worsened by a reliance on renewable energy sources.
This is because many solar and wind farms do not tend to provide so-called system inertia – the spinning momentum that turbines generate as a by-product – which can add to grid instability when there are sudden changes in supply and demand.
Supply and demand must be kept balanced at all times on electricity systems for the lights to stay on.
In the wake of the Spanish crisis, experts have also highlighted the relatively low number of interconnectors between the Iberian peninsula and the rest of the Continent.
A key link with France went offline as the blackouts spread and automatic systems kicked in to protect vital infrastructure from being damaged.