'Why don't we already do this?' Plan to bring energy from Morocco to UK

In the south-west of Morocco, a sprawl of wind and solar farms stretching over an area the size of Greater London could soon generate the green electricity powering more than 9m British homes.

- Jillian Ambrose

This is the vision of Sir Dave Lewis, the former Tesco boss who is hoping to build the world's longest subsea power cable in order to harness north Africa's renewable energy sources and power Britain's clean energy agenda.

If built, a 2,500-mile cable buried in trenches along the seabed would carry up to 8% of Great Britain's electricity from renewable energy and battery projects in Morocco's Tan-Tan province to the Devon coast in under a second.

Combined with Morocco's perennial sunshine and consistently healthy wind speeds, the project could in theory provide Britain with a predictable and reliable source of renewable energy for about 19 hours a day all year round.

It is an audacious endeavour on which Lewis is willing to stake his reputation. "When people first get to know what we're doing they say we're crazy. Then we explain, and they go along this curve until they get to the point where they're asking: 'Why don't we already do this?'" he says.

Lewis took up the job of executive chairman of Xlinks, the company behind the plans, in 2020 after carrying out a five-year rescue plan to bring Britain's biggest retailer back from the brink of collapse.

As he prepared to leave the supermarket chain in a "position of strength", he began to look for opportunities to play a role in tackling the climate crisis.

"It would have been very easy to stay at Tesco because in many ways the hard work had already been done. But I do worry about climate change, and I do think we have to do something about it," he says.

Since then he has been in talks with six energy secretaries over the past four years in the hope of clinching a deal that would allow the UK-Morocco project to start up by the end of the decade.