Recharge | XLCC shrugs off Moroccan upset as UK offshore wind boom anchors cable factory

The firm planning to build the UK's biggest dedicated HVDC subsea cable factory has shrugged off a sister company's failure to secure an offtake deal for a proposed Morocco-UK interconnector project, and hopes to break ground early next year.

The factory that XLCC intends to build in Hunterston, Scotland, was initially seen as an offshoot of an Xlinks plan to connect 11GW of Moroccan solar and wind power to the UK via a 4,000 kilometre subsea cable.

With so much attention focused on Xlinks, a £1.5bn ($2bn) plan by XLCC to manufacture high voltage direct current (HVDC) subsea power cables, and to build one of the world's biggest cable-laying vessels to install them, made fewer headlines at first.

In an interview with Recharge, XLCC chief executive Ian Douglas explained how the company is pressing ahead with a factory that will produce 525kV cable for offshore transmission lines, as well as 320kV HVDC kit aimed primarily at the growing number of offshore wind farms located more than 100km from their grid connections.