UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned
xlinks.co
xlinks.co
> Alongside the consistent output from its solar panels and wind turbines, an onsite 20GWh/5GW battery facility provide sufficient storage to reliably deliver each and every day
Four hour battery storage for renewables. The way of the future.
> This “first of a kind” project will generate 10.5GW of zero carbon electricity from the sun and wind to deliver 3.6GW of reliable energy for an average of 20+ hours a day.
The classic error, mixing up units: "3.6GW of reliable energy". The writer certainly means power here. [1] I work in energy, and have had teams like legal (and tools like Grammarly) think we're just mixing up words for fun. Regardless, definitely seems like a very sufficient install to supply real power and charge the battery for load shifting at utility scale.
[1]: https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Energy_vs_power
Also, the "time" of the battery is just a function of storage size and inverter sizing at peak discharge. It's often selected based on how the operator expects it to be used. (For example, Tesla sells megapacks in 2hr/4hr variants [1], and I think a lot of other grid-scale storage works this way. A 2hr megapack replaces some battery bays with more inverters.) While the battery is 4 hour capable, the operator could really intend for this to provide a constant overnight supply, and it could certainly provide that.
Please forgive my naive question. I have exactly zero relevant expertise.
The grid is one of the world's largest real-time reactive machines. Power is generated on the fly as you need it. You could draw a direct path from your home A/C switching on all the way back up the chain to some source needing to push power to meet your demand.
The supply of the grid is a big mix of diverse sources: renewables, natural gas, hydro, nuclear, coal—whatever. Each power source has different pros and cons, and you cannot really over-index on one to have a reliable grid. For example, nuclear is a fantastic and relatively clean source for base load (obviously, when handled responsibly), but not great to provide power that reacts to the shifts of demand through the day. Solar, obviously, doesn't work at night. The grid operator has to build a supply mix that fits the needs of their region. (And that's typically by facilitating energy market with different energy products where generators bid and participate.)
"A week's worth of storage" feels somewhat like an armchair simplification. It roughly sounds on target if we're moving toward the march of nines for real-time zero-carbon power supply, but...that honestly doesn't need to be the target expectation for today. Long term goal, yes. Today's targets really should be to get to 90-95% renewable, since chasing the last 5% will be the hardest and most expensive—and that's probably where we can acceptably use some dirtier backup sources. With the state of the grid today, there's lots and lots of power sources that can be replaced for cheaper and cleaner before we need to chase the long tail of 100% renewable at all hours during every season.
The reality though, is that all of these requirements are modeled, and the operator surely has their install min/maxed for typical use.
At the risk of being off topic, I personally have what energy-wonks could consider a "three hour" system (10kW solar, 15kW/43.5kWh battery, my typical daily energy use is between 25-50kWh, higher if I need to charge the car) and have done two weeks fully off-grid last summer, which included some cloudy weather. (True off-grid: the utility breaker was open to hard disconnect from the grid). While I could probably live full-time off grid in the summer, I definitely feel its better to have my system help clean up the grid where possible. So there's really a lot of flexibility to be had depending on the system's requirements.
It is. The way I've heard it explained by energy experts (or people who were introduced by the media as such) was that storage needs to be on the order of days/weeks, not hours. I'm sure that's something of a crude oversimplification for a lay audience and certainly not a rugged analysis for this particular project.
> With the state of the grid today, there's lots and lots of power sources that can be replaced for cheaper and cleaner before we need to chase the long tail of 100% renewable at all hours during every season.
I'm of the impression that "clean carbon" peaker-plants are fairly inefficient because there's a fair amount of overhead in starting them and consequently they don't actually end up being that much cleaner. :/ Unfortunately, I wish I had more to offer than "this is what I've heard an alleged energy expert say". :(
Grid demand is also significantly higher in the daytime so that 4h of battery allows you to very closely match users demands over 24 hours or ramp up during peak demand and fall back on other sources at night.
Furthermore, cost of storage is falling even faster than wind or solar ever did. Wait until next year, and you get lots more storage for your money.
Finally, batteries are good for very short-term storage -- their round-trip efficiency and fast response are unbeatable -- but they cost more than alternatives. For storage that you don't need to draw down every night, something you can fill cheap tanks with is better even if round-trip efficiency is low. Something you can also sell when your local tanks are full, and buy if they seem likely to go dry, is better yet.
So, expect to see a lot of anhydrous ammonia long-term storage. Also, hydrogen, and liquid nitrogen. And, lots of tropical sites synthesizing for export to higher latitudes in winter, and lots of higher-latitude cities importing it, via ship, in place of LNG and oil.
It is kind of surprising to see the batteries set up in Morocco, not in UK. That might be politics. Typically, storage is best sited near point-of-use. Maybe part of the deal is Morocco gets to use a share of the energy.
This is wishful thinking. These are very much research projects at present.
> Also, hydrogen, and liquid nitrogen.
Hydrogen makes no sense as energy storage. The energy costs of compression (and liquefaction, if you do that), and the risks, are just silly. Liquifying and regasifiying nitrogen are energy-expensive too.
It'd be better to combine hydrogen with air-captured carbon to make medium-chain hydrocarbons. We can store those at room temperature and pressure safely for season-long periods of time, as demonstrated by hundreds of millions of motor vehicles and tens of thousands of fuel depots.
Leaks of liquid hydrocarbons are much less likely to kill people than leaks of ammonia.
Hydrogen storage will be mostly underground, at low pressure. So, no compression or liquification needed. But, for transport it will be liquified and shipped just like LNG is today.
Liquifying nitrogen is extremely mature technology. A 100MW LN2 storage plant is under construction in Chile. Little hint, again: [ ... ]
"Re-gasifying" liquid nitrogen needs only ambient air, which (little hint) is all well above the boiling point of nitrogen.
If you think liquifying hydrogen takes a lot of energy, wait until you find out how much you need to synthesize hydrocarbons. Little hint: you will need a lot of hydrogen stockpiled. And, a lot of carbon with all the oxygen picked off.
Plenty of experimental GW scale nuclear reactors have been built, just look at the history of CANDU design for an example. That’s just the scale this stuff operates at, you need real world data to demonstrate it’s actually cost effective at scale and actually building stuff still requires actual R&D. Further, you don’t want to just build one you want multiple examples to see what costs look like when people building the thing have relevant experience.
Nuclear reactors have very difficult engineering problems unknown in most other technologies. For a nuke, you might actually need to build a GW-scale pilot plant to discover the failure modes that show up there. Not so, most things. A bigger dam just needs more turbines. A bigger wind farm just needs more wind turbines. A bigger solar farm just needs more panels. A bigger ammonia plant just needs more catalyzer units. You can start it running after the first one, and add more at leisure.
That is a thing that makes renewables + storage so much more attractive than nukes: You are guaranteed no unpleasant surprises, and no existential disasters. That it is also radically cheaper, and starts working immediately, is icing on a very nice cake.
Scale always brings new problems. The difference between hosting a website from your personal internet connection and building TickTock’s infrastructure isn’t simply writing a bigger check to someone.
How many people know how to build X. Where do you get the raw materials or parts etc, all to often the answer is you build a factory or a mine. Many basic assumptions break down with scale. You don’t use even close to the same equipment to connect your houses solar panels to the grid as you would a 1GW solar farm.
As to location. All the equipment you need for moving solar power around the grid like long distance power lines is exactly the same equipment you need for moving battery power at that location around the grid. Even better batteries charged with solar power get to avoid DC>AC inefficiency selling solar to the grid and AC>DC inefficiency charging the batteries. They get to skip out on equipment like redundant DC>AC inverters etc. You are even moving power through cooler power lines that therefore have less resistance.
And, storage adjacent to the point of use is less at risk of being wholly unavailable, e.g. if there is a problem with the cable. So, you need good reasons to put it somewhere else. That is not to say there cannot be such reasons, but what they are is of interest.
Storage closer to consumers has a huge number of issues being more expensive to manage, harder to scale, less efficient, etc etc. It sounds vastly more useful than it is because you end up increasing failure modes and make failing safe much harder.
In fact, as this particular transmission line will be feeding into the UK national grid, its normal role will be backup for offshore wind.
That somebody else at the end of a different transmission line might want access to the battery would be a good reason to site it where those lines meet. Another might be that you need to minimize fluctuations on power going through your transmission line. But whatever the reasons, they certainly will not be trivial, and might be revelatory. Trivially dismissing the question adds no light.
Require vast investments to add the capacity to handle storage and would be less efficient.
Your proposal is basically to spend 20% to 30% more money, loses and extra 4-7% electricity every charge discharge cycle and gains effectively nothing which is why nobody is doing it.
> how you top up local storage during supply peaks when you haven't got a local surplus.
Peak + filling storage requires extra transmission capacity which costs money to build and energy to use.
> At the end of a different transmission line.
Transmission lines work in either direction and are generally set up as an interconnected mesh. You want redundancy from the solar power plant to customers, but you also want redundancy from batteries to customers.
Ex: “you need to minimize fluctuations on power going through your transmission line.” That sounds reasonable, yes you need to maintain grid frequency etc, but it’s got almost nothing to do with transmission lines. Further there is equipment to deal with various transitory issues that is much cheaper than a giant battery + required equipment to connect those batteries to the electric grid.
So even your pedantic objections are misinformed.
Let’s look at a HVDC list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
VS say: https://cecgis-caenergy.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/260b451...
Looks like as I said HVDC are rare. It’s ok not to be an expert on something but don’t try to fake it you just look like a fool.
As to the topic, if you want to bring up unrelated and experimental storage technology then don’t pretend to be “shocked” that the topic expands.
:sigh: Well a win is a win.
In other words, the battery would bridge exactly 4 hours of 0% power generation. The moment you have more than 0% power generation but still less than 100%, the battery will last more than 4 hours of wall clock time.
It is usually a mistake to overbuild batteries. The money is better spent on PV panels, wind turbines, and grid tie-ins and, eventually, other storage media.
Only the beginning of the way i hope. 4 hours isn't even close to being enough for "reliable" electricity generation.
Beyond that, other technologies (pumped hydro, perhaps hydrogen electrolysis) are more economical.
1. https://storagewiki.epri.com/index.php/Energy_Storage_101/Te...
It will be interesting to see how sodium ion batteries will compete since their alkali metal is far more abundant than lithium, especially in stationary applications that don't need high energy/mass or energy/volume.
Perhaps surprisingly, round-trip efficiency matters a lot less than other things, for storage not drawn down often. And, it matters a lot less everywhere than only a short time ago, because top-line generating capacity has got so cheap, you can just build out enough more of that to make up the difference. If your liquified hydrogen is slowly boiling away, you just top up your tanks now and again.
The important difference from batteries I call attention to is that in batteries, you can only store exactly as much energy as you buy expensive batteries to keep it in. But for synthetic chemicals (and liquified nitrogen), the only expensive parts are what you use to synthesize them in, and maybe the way you get the energy back. Those capacities are measured in watts. Saying tankage is cheap is to note that there is no upper limit on the amount of tankage you can have, and the watt-hours you can bank; your bottleneck is only the conversion rate.
This is all aside from the fact that tankage can be shipped, both out, generating revenue from excess generating capacity, and in, if local storage gets drawn down too far.
So, batteries will be used for short-term storage. Iron-air battery factories are under construction, and those will be much cheaper than lithium, and will be used, but however much cheaper they are than other batteries, they cannot match empty tankage.
I think there are a lot of use cases for those fuels that don't even require a lot of long term storage, my current favorite being hydrogen fuel cell powered semi trucks that already burn a lot of diesel crossing places that have a lot of renewable electricity potential but not enough transmission (i.e. wind in the Great Plains and sun in the desert Southwest). This would get around the issues with batteries eating into truck weight limits.
Also, the idea of freight trucks "sailing" across the country on wind power is just an appealing narrative.
They might sell the excess to nearby truck stops. Ammonia is not quite as dense as diesel, but trucks typically have enough room for it. Advantage is trucks (like farm tractors) can be cheaply retrofitted to burn ammonia.
I see reports about a problem of UK farmers who make more from dedicated solar, per hectare, than they were making growing. The problem may be self-limiting: they may end up unable to compete with farmers doing double- or triple-use, with solar, wind, and cultivation in the same field. Then, farmers not doing it will end up needing to, as prices decline.
> The problem may be self-limiting: they may end up unable to compete with farmers doing double- or triple-use, with solar, wind, and cultivation in the same field.
Can you share that report?
I'd like to see a triple use farm. Great idea in concept, but I doubt that there a lot places that have a climate that makes wind, solar, and shade vegetable growth economical on the same land. Otherwise we would see this pervasively across California's Central valley.
Renewables are still very far from built out, so not seeing something done in your vicinity tells you very little about its practicality.
A pretty good rundown on shared use for solar PV and vegetable crops is at https://greencoast.org/agrivoltaics/ with reports of better yields, up to 3x in certain crops, from reduced heat stress and water loss, and also higher efficiency in the panels from cooler operation.
There are many different configurations being experimented with. Just elevating and spacing out the panels in otherwise conventional installations is common. But some are putting in exactly-vertical, double-sided panels, starting near ground level, that they drive tractors between. Panels have been used on the roofs of greenhouses for a long time. Using the framework supporting panels for other apparatus, such as irrigation piping, is common. In some fields, panels are placed directly above plants to protect them against harsh weather.
There are experiments with partially transparent panels, that harvest the green light plants don't use, and pass the rest through.
An example of people in UK complaining (at length) about solar PV displacing agriculture is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFgM5hO2e1Y
I assume batteries in 10 years will be vastly better/cheaper.
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/20000-volts-under-the-sea
"The Xlinks project is a pretty good concept, and yet…it needs access to materials already claimed by many others at prices increasing by the day, it needs to build an entire HVDC industry in Britain from the ground up, and it needs money, lots of it."
Britain already has several HVDC undersea interconnectors with Europe. These are maintained and there is design and construction capability. If not in Britain, then nearby.
1. https://www.northsealink.com/
2. https://www.ifa1interconnector.com/
3. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/energy-policy-and-regulation/policy... (Scroll down for electricity.)
So the UK should get over itself, connect to larger grid that’s already operating on three sides. The same is probably true for Morocco, and at some point these photovoltaic-in-the-desert ideas will become economical, although I’m not entirely sure if we are there yet (the desert is less ideal for solar cells than one thinks, because heat isn’t linear proportional to irradiation).
There was a fire recently, but it's a strategic connection.
https://ifa1interconnector.com/
Also the UK is connected to Norway
And Ireland also
https://www.eirgridgroup.com/customer-and-industry/interconn...
Politically, maybe. Technically and financially, not at all.
There’s 3GW of interconnection between france and the UK with a 4th under construction, and france is a broker / hub between germany, italy, spain, and the UK (as well as its own production).
Complete nonsense. France buys renewable electricity from neighbours all the time, both for itself and to sell to other neighbours. France also sells its own electricity.
A new interconnect between france and Spain is under construction (the biscay bay line), in order to bring the exchange capacity between them up to 5GW.
Also it would seem the south of France or Portugal would be much closer for the solar part.
From the article:
> When domestic renewable energy generation in the United Kingdom drops due to low winds and short periods of sun, the project will harvest the benefits of long hours of sun in Morocco
If this is economical enough - I'd be all for it rather than paying energy companies to keep coal-fired power stations ready to belch out smog at a moments notice.
But as you brought it up, even if there was a semi-conductor breakthrough tomorrow the political reasons to go direct would still be there. The EU wants the UK to be subservient to the Commission for ideological, political and economic reasons. The UK doesn't want to be back in that situation. The EU would absolutely make energy transit dependent on all manner of entirely irrelevant topics - fish is the current one but there would be others - and thus making electricity supplies dependent on the EU would end up being equivalent to being sucked back in, not as a member state but as a vassal state.
In fact it tends not to think of the UK at all, these days.
As to being "fair game": that's true, in the sense that the EU will place the interests of member states over those of the UK. That dynamic must be among the least surprising developments of history, considering it is both obvious and formed the core of every serious prediction in the run-up to Brexit.
There was plenty of swagger back in those days with fantasies of renewed UK superpower domineering the EU and extracting every concession it can think of. "Fantasy" because that's just not how it works if the other party makes up 60 % of your foreign trade, but you make up less than 10 % of theirs.
So here we are now, with the UK coming up with these harebrained schemes that feel like some party organized with the specific purpose of not inviting your ex.
> need for control and action on a local level
Ah you mean that local control and democracy when the party with 13% of the votes gets 0.2% seats in the parliament", right? [1]
[1] Great CGP Grey video on the 2015 General Election in the UK: https://youtu.be/r9rGX91rq5I
Indeed, they do. So you really have no right to point fingers at "non-democratic EU bureaucracy" when at worst it's the same system as in the UK.
> The EU failed to make a case for the importance of its democratic process
You realise that the UK was in the EU? That it was one of its founding members? That the perceived failure to do anything about this process is shared by the UK as well?
P.s. a broken and undemocratic or unrepresentative bureaucracy is not going to be solved or fixed by adding higher levels of beuraucracy.
Ah, my mistake. I was pretty sure the UK was a founding member.
> I feel that many in the UK regard it's parliament as the highest authority in law- and decision-making. Any body resting higher than that is going to face difficulty when attempting to claim greater and greater control over laws, and running them from "far away" even if that far away place was Brussels.
That is basically the failure of UK politicians, too. But, as Yes, Minister very rightly put it, perhaps the UK wasn't in there for any kind of unity to begin with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVYqB0uTKlE :)
> The UK also wasn't part of the Euro, and so one of the main benefits of EU membership and coherence was missing
The UK isn't the only country without the Euro though.
> amongst the working classes that the low-wage sector was being undermined by labour coming in freely from abroad, mainly eastern Europe, and this wasn't reciprocal, i.e. they couldn't go to eastern Europe, or basically anywhere else in Europe, and get the same benefit from doing so.
"They took our jobs" is also a failure of the politicians. Though, for them it's not a failure, it's votes for the next election.
---
In the end, "the EU wants us to be subservient to undemocratic bureaucracy" ends up being "there was a general feeling perpetuated and encouraged by our own politicians and that doesn't really have much to do with reality" ;)
"They took our jobs" isn't exactly true, but what has happened is that wages stayed low and conditions got worse due to capitalism's demand for lower costs and greater efficiency. So a source of cheap labour from Eastern Europe only served that process and made it such that companies didn't have to invest in people locally, because anyone could come in and do the job, and in the case of people from Eastern Europe, our minimum wages were higher than those provided by skilled professions. (I worked with a guy whose mother was the head nurse of a hospital in Hungary, and on a wage of £400 per month, so he was earning a small fortune in comparison even though that came at the cost of working to hours and conditions that UK workers would reject). So levelling all the blame for this phenomenon at UK politicians is moot because there is really little they could do about it, the EU comes with complete freedom of movement, which many in the UK saw as not really providing them with any benefit while coming with big downsides that affect them on a daily basis.
> That is basically the failure of UK politicians, too. But, as Yes, Minister very rightly put it, perhaps the UK wasn't in there for any kind of unity to begin with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVYqB0uTKlE
I'm well aware of Yes, Minister. While it gives a humourous take on the eccentricity and backwardness of our process, my point nevertheless stands. The UK has long-since developed a system where we defer our individual sovereign rights into the figurehead of our monarch, through which we act collectively, controlled by parliament and the house of Lords. While this corrupt pyramid scheme is deeply flawed, it's nevertheless the one we've got and has developed a consensus in law lasting 1000+ years, and adding novel supranational layers above this was fraught with difficulty, even if they were just perceptual and conceptual difficulties.
That's why when you read about EU law changes you so often read about negotiations between the Parliament and Commission. In the UK the executive branch implements the will of the legislative branch. In the EU the Parliament is often found implementing the will of the executive. Technically it's not a Parliament at all, due to this lack of the "right of initiation".
Last time I checked the UK was still the sole country in the world refusing an official ambassador status to the representative of the EU and the sole country to have threaten to unilaterally withdraw from an international treaty with the EU in clear breach of international law. I think your definition of genuine and mine differ substantially.
The genuine best efforts spanned from 2017-ish (negotiations didn't start in 2016 after the vote) to 2019. It took a while for the UK to realise the EU no longer wanted to be friendly and cordial, and that's when the UK's own stance finally changed.
A bilateral treaty between the UK and EU is not "international law". A bilateral treaty contains exit clauses that can be invoked if necessary. The Geneva Convention is an example of an international law. Though I don't know specifically what you are referring to in your example.
The UK wasted everyone time during 3 years asking for things which it was told at the beginning were impossible and kept reneging on their agreements during the whole thing. The UK never made genuine best efforts. You have to be a die-hard brexiter and far removed for reality to start believing that.
I was specifically speaking about the Irish agreement which the UK threatened to withdraw from without respecting the exit clauses.
Anyway, I just wanted to re-establish a modicum of truth regarding the way the negociations went. I propose I now go back to my usual attitude towards the UK - general disinterest.
A veiled threat is not breaking any clauses. You should look up the number of times the Swiss (and others) have threatened to withdraw from so-and-so agreement with the EU. It isn't new. The EU has dozens of active arguments/negotiations with dozens of countries at any given time. And we already established that this is a bilateral treaty and without any guarantors (unlike the Good Friday Agreement) and hence could be ripped up at a moments notice by either party if they so chose. Just look at the number of times France has made threats in relation to the Trade and [non-]Cooperation Agreement (TCA). The exit clauses are merely there to offer a graceful means of pre-agreed exit strategies.
The EU however *literally drafted emergency powers legal text* to trigger the Article 16 (exit clause) of the N.I. Protocol during a dispute - a petty, tawdry and without any basis in reality dispute at that - regarding Covid-19 vaccines.
It is remarkable how the tone of your posts reveals how "on edge" you are about this. Even laden with typos such is the haste with which you type. It (Brexit - an event which concluded over two years ago) is clearly still a very raw nerve for you.
you're not exactly up to date as this was sorted almost a year ago
I've just paid a €5 handling fee (just the handling fee, there was zero customs fee or any VAT levied) to receive an item sent by post from the UK to the EU, it was sent by post with a declared value of £3, and labelled as a gift.
Yes, I know all about declaring artificially low customs values - been there, done that - but in this case it was a single item of used childrens clothing, the best part of 40 years old(!) and of absolutely zero value other than to the recipient, it was being gifted from one generation to the next.
Somehow cheap electronics orders from China seem have always sailed through EU customs just fine :/
OTOH I can fly to Stansted for less than €10 all-in. Maybe next time it would be cheaper to fly to the UK and collect in person. Given the challenges of climate change, this option in particular appears to demonstrate how not-joined-up international policymaking currently is :(
As we should be. "We" spent years going "we've got the EU over a barrel, we'll make them bend to our whim, they need us more than we need them". Brexiteers now finding out that "leaving the EU" means we're no longer on their side and negotiating against 27 united countries sucks, well it would be funny if it wasn't hurting so many people.
Also, it's kind of funny how you say it has absolutely nothing to do with Brexit and immediately jump into an anti-EU rant, probably not the smoothest transition :D
My understanding is that:
Acting as a group the EU has made some "pragmatic" decisions like fishing in western Sahara waters, but probably found it relatively easy to turn down less economic and/or more illegal activities as a block. If the UK were to more fully ignore UN decisions and accept natural resource from the disputed lands, the loss of respecting the rules is much more a loss for the EU than Morocco.
Honestly, the EU27 have their own home-grown grid problems to deal with[0], helping third countries transit power through the EU territories must be right at the bottom of the list!
Austria and Germany had a single electricity price zone ... until October 2018, one of the reasons blamed for the split was "slow grid expansion"[1].
[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/german-ele...
[1] https://www.apg.at/api/sitecore/projectmedia/download?id=24f...
Obviously- that may be wrong, but let’s see, would be cool if it’s true.
These things are all matters of fact. From the EU's perspective these things are not "negative" exactly, but merely the way they play the game. Everything is connected to everything else and any inter-dependency may become leverage in any unrelated area of cooperation at any time.
What a load of Brexiteer crap. The UK was never subservient, they were among the top decision makers and powers in the EU. Brexit UK wants to have its cake and eat it too and is simply impossible. You can't be independent from the EU on trade and power simply because of the proximity and history. Blindly cutting off your nose to spite the EU is as dumb as it was when all of this started. As soon as the UK recognises it needs the EU as much as the EU needs it, all will be better.
Few egregious examples of the UK being intentionally obtuse to spite the EU while also harming itself - refusals to accept existing treaties on a bunch of stuff, refusal to accept treaties they signed a few months ago. The whole NI question for which they still haven't accepted a solution. The fish debacle ( the UK refusing to license EU-based ships).
The whole idea of the EU is that all nations in it are subservient to the commission. We like it that way because that makes the collaboration more rational and it makes the rising tide lift all the boats. Wether you agree with it or not, the idea of the Brexit is that the UK can be strong without the EU, possibly even stronger. Wether that will happen remains to be seen.
But how can you say they can't be independent of the EU in power while commenting on an article that's literally about them establishing power bypassing the EU?
I'd love for the UK to come back to us in the EU. But their "intentional obtuse"-ness is exactly what they should be doing to make good on their promises to the citizens of the UK.
I aspire to be as considerate and reasonable in my dialogue on the subject, as much as I'd like it to go away (much like most Europeans, I guess!) :)
It really really isn't though
How is that statement different from stating that the whole idea of the UK is that all countries in the UK are subservient to the Cabinet?
> The EU wants the UK to be subservient to the Commission for ideological, political and economic reasons
Is categorically and empirically false. The Commission doesn't have an ideology, and doesn't want subservience from anyone. Their job is cooperation and improvement.
No, the commission does have an ideology, it's encoded in the Treaty of European Union. For example "founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities".
Also subservience is encoded in the treaties, for example when you sign the treaty you agree that the court of the European Union becomes your highest court, and that European law overrides your national law. Effectively any court decision can be overruled by the European Court of Justice if it conflicts with European law.
Besides the law there's all sorts of other restrictions where a nations interest are subservient to those of the union as a whole. Usually to prevent a nation from giving their local industries an edge over those in other European countries.
The fish debacle ( the UK refusing to license EU-based ships).
There are lots of licensed EU fishing vessels. Note that Jersey isn't actually a part of the UK, technically it's a Crown Dependency. Anyway. The full story of the dispute is much more complicated than that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Jersey_dispute
Summary:
- After Brexit an amnesty period was agreed before the new fishing permissions were enforced on UK/Jersey territorial waters.
- French fishermen reacted by adopting unsustainable fishing techniques like aggressive trawling. Basically trying to extract as much marine wealth as possible before they were restricted. "Young accused French trawlers of "breaking the spirit of the amnesty" and that due to recent dredging by French trawlers that Jersey's marine ecology "won’t take this for much longer and, if it goes on, we will have to close the area off for years". This hadn't been anticipated in the agreement and appears to have poisoned relations from the get-go.
- The agreement involved granting licenses to fishermen who had been fishing there previously and could evidence that. The French authorities weren't submitting valid evidence to the Jersey authorities (blaming bureaucratic screwups like lost documents).
- Because the evidence wasn't meeting the requirements, licenses weren't always being issued quickly.
So far, ordinary bureaucracy. It should have never really reached public attention at all, as it could have been sorted out between the local authorities. Unfortunately what followed was this:
1. Blockades of Jersey harbor by the French fishermen, with the French government doing nothing.
2. French boats were repeatedly caught illegally fishing, claiming they'd been told by the French government they could fish wherever they wanted. See the trawling problems above.
3. Shortly after, the French government banned Jersey fishermen from landing fish in France. No justification was given. This was in violation of the agreement and Jersey thus said it'd appeal to the EU Commission. That was not only ignored but the French simply escalated the ban to include all freight movements, again, in plain violation of the agreements.
4. The French government then escalated again and threatened multiple times to cut off Jersey's electricity supply in retaliation.
From the UK's perspective this was all well out of proportion to the scale of the problem. Also it involved unilateral violations of the agreement by France, no workable suggestions for how to do things better and after that an MEP argued that it should be escalated to full blown trade sanctions. Without passing judgement on which side was "right" in this dispute it's obvious why the UK would want to diversity energy supplies away from the EU.
Fishing 'debacle' was because the UK governments have no interest in fishing nor in the far wider issue of the sustainability and viability of costal communities. They were happy to give away fishing rights because that's what the needs of the markets demand. They only become interested in fishermen/women when they think there are some votes in it. Same for Macron.
It's all extremely cynical. And I say this as someone who voted for Brexit, and would do so again.
OTOH, the UK government recently (2020) passed laws that overrode Jersey's independence in this regard and there were rumours that the UK was getting ready to basically give the EU what they wanted here in return for concessions in other areas, much to the outrage of people on Jersey itself. However, that hasn't materialized. So I guess we'll see to what extent you're proven right.
The point of mentioning Brexit is to stress that the physics alone makes this sort of project hard to justify on technical grounds, specially when there is a wealth of renewable energy projects right around Britain's corner.
You need to be specially motivated to circumvent any of the low-hanging fruit projects with European nations to head down to Africa to get your electricity.
If it's an idea obvious enough to occur to a teenager 20 years ago it hardly requires politics to explain why it comes up now, does it? At the time I gave up on the idea because either I didn't find out about HVDC or it wasn't as effective as it is now. Transmission losses seemed to kill the idea. Now apparently that's more or less solved and other issues dominate like manufacturing costs and mineral availability.
As for renewables being abundant near by - where? UK already built tons of windmills. You can't get baseload-level renewable power from adding more of those because there are days when the wind stops blowing. As for solar in Europe, land is at a premium there and they're already wanting to use available resources for their own needs, rightly so. Also worth considering - for unclear reasons global wind speeds have been slowing down over time. Long term wind projects need to factor that in to their economic calculations. Solar doesn't have that issue.
I'm afraid you failed to understand the point.
There is no question that Morocco has an impressive potential in solar power. Morocco's hydrogen production project is very exciting.
But that's besides the point, and not the issue being discussed.
What clearly is a bonkers idea and has no technical nor strategic justification, let alone in a national security perspective, is the UK wasting it's resources trying to get renewable sources way down in Africa, specially when there are already a wealth of projects already underway right next door.
For perspective, the Dogger bank is home for some wind farm projects which are already similar energy production capacity, such as the Dogger Bank Wind Farm.
Nonetheless, adding more windmills isn't going to materially change anything at this point. To push renewables further requires them to be reliable enough to start displacing base load.
I don't personally think this cable idea is good either but more because of the costs and risks of cable cuts (possibly deliberate), than the belief that it can be done in other ways.
You mean, the UK was one of the three largest powers in the EU with all the power to influence its policy and direction which it did.
Instead, the UK adopted the attitude of "we are a superpower, you owe us everything, we owe you nothing" to which the planet's largest economic union and one of the planet's largest markets calmly responded, "u wot mate?"
About a year into the whole Brexit brouhaha the EU said, look, here are the various agreements and levels of agreements we have with all the countries [1] (taking from the amazing short overview here [2]). You don't want Norway style because "it's EU with extra steps", you don't want Switzerland-style because "same thing", you don't want Ukraine or Turkey-style because you don't want to be bound by EU trade agreements etc.
At every step of the way UK's reaction was "these Brussels democrats are smothering our great independent nation, they must give us everything we want". That's not how negotiations work. Especially not with an economic block of ~450 million people who are your biggest trading partners.
And after all that puffing and chest-beating, almost seven years into the whole Brexit ordeal UK also "suddenly" discovered the whole Northern Ireland border issue. Which tells you a lot about the competence of your government.
So, no. UK went from being the country with the largest influence on EU policy to an outside country that has to deal with the EU on the same terms as every other country from outside the EU.
Given that the UK has left the EU, couldn't you call every trade deal or cultural exchange with a non-EU country a Brexit project?
Even if it is, what is wrong with that? The people of Britain voted for Brexit and now need their elected officials to deliver, which motivates projects like these
Edit: to clarify, i live in London and i didn't vote for Brexit. Regardless of the outcome, I consider it a national security issue and a productivity boost to have cheap energy collected from a diverse set of sources from solar plants abroad to domestic nuclear energy plants and off-shore wind turbines.
If you live in Britain, would you really prefer Britain stop investing in projects like these, just because there was an election result you disagreed with?
the desired position of many is that the UK should crawl off into a corner and almost die, then will have to come crawling back to the EU to show that is indispensable
projects like this work counter to that narrative
We are where we are. Politics is a thing.
If it pushes along the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, I don't care if it's "inefficient". Show me a major company that hasn't wasted money or done something in a way that is technically less than optimal.
The latter being a dictionary definition of a bad idea, the first being the buffoons who lied about it, flying kites, tossing dead cats around to manipulate the conversation and ultimately shove it through, half cocked.
This looks like yet another kite to be sold with: "Look what we can do now we're out of that wretched EU".
Possibly a nice idea, aggressively detached from reality.
At the same time, the electrification of heating + transport is predicted to approximately double UK electricity demand by 2050. So even if this goes ahead and works as intended, it will end up providing something like 4% of the UK's needs.
A whole bunch of comments here comparing this idea negatively to wind, nuclear or tankers filled with hydrogen (?!). Even if it goes ahead, there need to be like a dozen other new projects of similar scale just to meet demand on these small islands. If you also want to provide carbon free electricity to the other 10 billion people likely to be living on this planet by that 2050, then you need to multiply that dozen projects by a factor of at least 100.
Separately, if at some random point in the future the relations between the UK and Morocco go south, it’s much easier to change suppliers if you use tankers. The EU is investing massively in Hydrogen, so the Worldwide Hydrogen market will be quite mature in 10 to 20 years.
Even from Morocco’s point of view, the same calculus applies. If the UK sanctions Morocco, and refuses to take delivery of electricity, how do you find an alternate buyer if the transmission line is in place? With Hydrogen tankers, you simply start selling to China or someone else, or you put the Hydrogen in some medium-long term storage. This gives you more leeway to negotiate whatever diplomatic situation you found yourself in.
Cameras/sensors, and fast response time. You could put a sensor package every couple km. Given the amount of power this installation delivers, it wouldn't exactly break the bank.
There has been a significant push back against the project locally and so I suspect it won’t be built to the scale proposed. The main criticism is that the land is particularly fertile.
0: https://www.mallardpasssolar.co.uk/
1: https://www.stamfordmercury.co.uk/news/amp/clock-is-ticking-...
the government agrees: https://news.sky.com/story/jersey-fishing-dispute-frances-si...
(and has denied construction of new interconnectors to France since)
Spain would definitely use an interconnector as leverage re: Gibraltar
Every country in the EU submit to the majority law, that's the idea of an union, even France or Germany do not have everything to their liking every time.
If it did that, it wouldn't have gotten out of the common market. The UK is way past sensible choices in its best interests, and is firmly in the "cut its nose to spite the EU".
the answer is: you can't
A better argument would be that digging or laying 3000Km 12GW terrestrial electric line through Spain and France would be expensive and especially difficult to sell to them, even if they could benefit from the energy.
Aquind cancellation is about financial stability of the developper, its russian origin, and politicals connections to the tories and also ecological interest groups lobbying on both side of the interconnector.
Wrong, in any meaningful way, and obviously so: the linked index rates democracy on multiple dimensions, including protection of civil liberties, electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, and political culture. It’s impossible to rate high on all those issues and not be “stable” in any meaningful sense.
FWIW Morocco is also quite stable, among the best both in Africa and the Arab world.
However, a dictatorship can ALSO be stable - just look at North Korea. Democracy is not the only way to achieve stability.
EDIT: Belgium and Norway is the fourth and fifth respectively, and apparently Denmark is planned.
I'm just commenting upon the likely motivations are primarily domestic politics and geopolitics given its pretty obvious that you could achieve similar results by doing this with onshore wind and solar installations in southern Spain with lower technical and cost requirements.
Its definitely true that outside of the EU we are going to be treated differently than if we were EU members. EU members will always come first, and geopolitical spats with say Spain over Gibraltar or France over fishing that would otherwise get mediated via the EU could now be higher risk in future.
It's very very far from being a perfect or even good country (for most of us moroccans), but it has an almost bulletproof record w.r.t foreign investment. The usually very slow "makhzen" (state bureaucracy) can suddenly become super super efficient to attract foreign capital. Tanger-MED and the huge automobile industry around it is a very good example of that.
A few percent more sun, cheaper builders, I can understand this choice.
Morocco isn't Russia, but handing your life support to a distant and culturally different country in a less stable world region with limited history of partnership (European colonisation until the 1950s) seems daft. I mean, compared to building nuclear power inside UK territory and wind farms off shore of the UK. For national security reasons if not environmental ones.
[1] https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live
[2] https://abmec.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2021-02-Moro...
Perhaps, but making yourself a vital part of keeping the lights on for a country with a brutal colonial history within living memory, a much more capable military, and a military base 36 miles from Tangier… seems even more daft.
As horrible as it sounds, Morocco isn't a nuclear power and would be crushed in an afternoon by UK armed forces while western media across the planet creates a hundred different justifications and the world's diplomats send their congratulations for neutralising the energy terrorists because they couldn't care less what happens to them.
This is a completely different situation wrt to Germany <-> Russia
The only remotely conceivable way that the UK would have of projecting significant power onto the Moroccan mainland is by trying to foment a civil war. Otherwise they would not get anything out of it.
If the US even allowed the UK to do such a foolish thing, it would be disastrous long-term for the whole of Europe. Completely alienating and breaking off with North Africa means that Europe is now completely surrounded with unfriendly countries.
Morocco is even within reasonable distance for the UK to run sorties from UK air bases, let alone including aircraft carriers, cruise missile attacks from submarines, etc.
If you want to take a country's resources by force, there is no option short of a ground campaign. Without a civil war in Morocco (that the UK couldn't make happen even if they tried), there is no way for them to put boots on the ground. The only way would be to cut a deal with Algeria or Mauritania for a ground invasion (not happening!), or to stage some kind of amphibious landing.
I thought that by now people would have understood that you can't win a war through air power only.
> Morocco isn't a nuclear power and would be crushed in an afternoon by UK
> This is a completely different situation wrt to Germany <-> Russia
The irony is palpable. Yes, the UK would probably get a "win" but not in an afternoon and this energy project would be destroyed - rather pointless.
You could just have coal reserves on standby and contingency energy deals with France.
The UK can't quit Russian oil, coal, and gas any faster than Germany - that should teach you a lesson.
> deliver 3.6GW of reliable energy
and
> be capable of supplying 8 percent of Great Britain’s electricity needs
...from which I assume they're projecting a total energy consumption of about 3.6/0.08 = 45GW in 2030.
I'm intrigued by how 1,500km² of partial shade will transform the Sahara ecosystem.
I hope it will make more life possible in the shade.
The Gibraltar issue crops up every now and then for instance so having control over an electrical connection gives the Spanish government more leverage.
Same with France and the dispute over fishing waters. Only recently France were threatening to cut off power to Jersey.
Just want to add that it was a bit different than that. More exactly, an English newspaper asked a French official if cutting electricity off was a possibility and that official answered nothing more than "the treaty that was agreed upon does include this as a possibility".
It was never an actual threat or in any plan at the time.
[Europe Minister] Clément Beaune, who is a close ally of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said action would be decided on within days and discussions were already in motion .... [Beaune] added, "We defend our interests. We do it nicely, and diplomatically, but when that doesn’t work we take measures. The Channel Islands, the UK, are dependent on us for their energy supply. They think they can live on their own and badmouth Europe as well. And because it doesn’t work, they indulge in one-upmanship, and in an aggressive way"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/05/france-uk-jers...
"Reducing supplies (of electricity to Jersey) is possible, but cutting the power to every Jersey resident this winter is something that will not happen and something that I do not want," Europe Minister Clement Beaune told BFM-TV in an interview.
https://www.dailysabah.com/world/europe/france-could-reduce-...
France could cut electricity supply to UK Channel Island Jersey unless a post-Brexit fishing agreement is respected, Maritime Minister Annick Girardin told the French parliament May 4.
https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...
French fishermen are struggling to obtain fishing licenses allowing them to keep working in U.K. waters, including in Jersey. They must show they have been fishing in these waters from 2012 to 2016 using GPS data, which some don't have. "As you know, the [Brexit] agreement contains retaliatory measures ... So as far as Jersey is concerned, I would remind you, for example, of the transport of electricity via submarine cables. So we have the means, and even though I'm sorry it has come to this, we will do so if we have to," she told the French parliament.
https://www.politico.eu/article/fishing-brexit-eu-uk-jersey/
Has your "Z" bumper sticker arrived in the mail yet?
it is most definitely not
it handed it over in the peace treaty that ended the war
> The Catholic King does hereby, for himself, his heirs and successors, yield to the Crown of Great Britain the full and entire propriety of the town and castle of Gibraltar, together with the port, fortifications, and forts thereunto belonging; and he gives up the said propriety to be held and enjoyed absolutely with all manner of right for ever, without any exception or impediment whatsoever.
full text here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Peace_and_Friendship_Treaty_o...
> Oversee territories are a shame on every countries that still hold them be it the UK or France.
meanwhile Spain has two enclaves of the exact same type of in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla
The fact that it was taken by force in 1701 didn’t magically teleport it from Spain to anywhere where it made sense for it to be part of the UK.
> meanwhile Spain has two enclaves of the exact same type of in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla
It’s not less shameful.
on Earth: previously political boundaries were set on the outcome of armed conflicts
Great Britain won the last one against Spain, and gained Gibraltar as a result over 300 years ago
these days we are slightly more enlightened and tend to mainly believe in self-determination
the people living in Gibraltar wish to remain British
giving them up to Spain against their wishes would be an act of imperialism (commonly frowned on in the 21st century)
Every border is a result of "taken from them at gunpoint." (It's not hard to find folks who had large pieces of Spain taken from them at gunpoint.)
Dependency isn't a claim. It is, however, a tool for taking.
It's like Hong Kong, in a sense. Land the UK took because it could from a weaker country due to its strategic location, but which is mostly integrated with it's former country in terms of labour and services.
Yes, Gibraltar is dependent on Spain for services. As I pointed out, that's a tool for changing the border. (Blockades are an act of war, so that would be "at gunpoint.")
However, that dependence isn't an argument that the border is "wrong".
What’s next? Claim Ireland maybe?
(referendums in both were >99% remain in the UK)
My fellow humans remember a thing: a national grid is not national because of politics but because a such critical part of a country infra it's better to be self-sufficient under nation borders and hopefully self-sufficient inside those borders even in case of major attacks (translated, not few big power plants, but many small and a distribution network designed to survive significant damages).
We, westerners have had the best industry and technology in the world, now for some neoliberals economic devastating ideas we pull it apart outsourcing anything because that's pay back, in thin air, well, and now we see a new world power, China, arise and we see our power wane. How much damage we want to take before annihilating with lifelong court rulings against those economy-driven society? We really want to wait till being completely lost?
So you better think this over long and hard before sending your cheap submarine down there.
Personally I'd be much more concerned about the kind of damage marine life, fishing and cargo ships would do to that cable and how to armor against that. Probably by the time you've taken all that into account you have also defended against that sub. And finally, the same thing of course goes for all of those other undersea cables, communications ones for instance.
Such attacks can even disable half a country grid just due to the big drop in frequency of the whole grid, spark enormous outrage and can also be both really damaging and really quick to fix. Life it's complicated, where no one can easy see anything can happen, design things to avoid potential attack surface is a good way to protect themselves.
We do not normally have strokes, but we put defibrillators everywhere for a reason, we do not have much car accidents but we design cars to make us survive important ones etc. A critical infra like an energy grid... Oh, sure we in the west are equally dependent on foreign supply chains for oil, uranium etc but we stockpile them a bit, months for oil, an year or two for uranium, it's not the same of electricity in a grid...
Just see how many issues are there due to some supply chain issues in south China or the "Ever given" crisis in Suez. We are already hyper-vulnerable planning even bigger vulnerabilities for the future it does not sound that smart to me.
Such "infra projects" are like, much like, the Desertech scam, a project to deliver p.v. from north-Africa to Europe able just to detour significant amount of public funds to a small set of private players. This one is just a bit smaller but essentially copy the same plot.
Other large infra projects, nearly 99% of all large ones, results in public money black holes for very limited results. At a smaller and more technical size we have had a period where anything must be big, after we learn that many small things are better than few big ones, that's happen for ship (with the sole exception of tourism), planes (777/A380 fiasco), giant road infra and so on. No conspiracy, at least if your vocabulary do not classify "economy" as "conspiracy" and rationality as plot.
Did you remember why we have switched from mainframes to cluster?
No, this is not 'normal prudence', it is completely off-the-wall conspiracy stuff. If you think this is normal then that is really problematic.
What you call conspiracy is normally named classic strategy by all who study and use it. So any normally prudent State do it's best to avoid creating potential threats potentially used against itself. Some do not just because those threats are corruption-fueled economy. And again we see countless examples in just the very recent history.
The cases you list are the exceptions, not the rule. Fact: undersea optical cables would be trivial to destroy. But as a rule they work well. Fact: water infrastructure, gas infrastructure and power infrastructure is vulnerable. But it actually works quite well. Fact: logistics infrastructure is fragile, as are most buildings. And yet, most of it seems to hold up quite well. Ok we get the occasional crazy person but that doesn't mean society grinds to a halt or that we are going to re-do all of our bridges, crossings and foundations.
Hardened? No. Design to minimize unpleasant events? Yes. Just for instance did you lock your hose door? It's pointless since thief can still going in and locked or not the chance of being stolen it's not that much. Even that we still produce doors with keys to lock them, try finding a front door without in the market to discover it yourself.
> The cases you list are the exceptions, not the rule. Fact: undersea optical cables would be trivial to destroy. But as a rule they work well.
Sure because they are useful for all parties.
> Fact: water infrastructure, gas infrastructure and power infrastructure is vulnerable. But it actually works quite well.
And have seen a significant spikes in attacks... However again: just see Russian gas to the EU: both parties, with Ukraine as third can destroy the ducts, they do not do that simply because they are equally interested in them: Russia need to sell gas, they have already made the infra, they want money. EU need the gas, without it too many industries will stop. Ukraine use that gas itself and even if they decide to take the damage BOTH EU and Russia will be against them for the collateral damage they suffer.
Actually electricity from Morocco to UK, if cut touch nearly only the UK, so it's a potential target.
> Fact: logistics infrastructure is fragile, as are most buildings. And yet, most of it seems to hold up quite well.
Oh yeah, sure, so the big supply disruption so far is just a small issue in your opinion? In buildings term the fact that our cities can't evolve anymore and we need them evolved is not an issue, to a point we have made the ONU New Urban Agenda? Not counting the continuous debate of low quality buildings, in general, but more in particular big ones where issues might led to far bigger consequences...
> Ok we get the occasional crazy person but that doesn't mean society grinds to a halt or that we are going to re-do all of our bridges, crossings and foundations.
Sorry for keeping such rude tone up but we are actually re-do the society, it's a never-ending process and we are here in a bad shape also thanks to those who say "anything is well, we can continue toward infinitum".
You're not really sorry. And you won't be re-doing anything, all you will do is write longish comments about your worldview.
For instance can you state that there is no such polemics about low quality/dangerous buildings, more or less across the entire world with few tragic examples here and there (like skyscraper fires)?
Can you state why since we veeeeeery rarely, at least in the west world, have a puncture/flat a car tire we still have or a spare wheel or something to try repairing the aforementioned puncture?
Can you state why the entire world after the supply chain crisis start talk about resilience, the yesterday just-in-time Toyota-system mania now is depicted as crazy, "we need stocks" etc?
Just for few samples. I'm really curious to here them. Oh, of course, I agree that such disruptive events are very rare! I just counter the fact that we can ignore them in designing such infra because they are so rare.
I am more interested (again if the project is a go) what happens if / when some "friendly" people will mess with the cable.
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/20000-volts-under-the-sea?s=...
In China, there is a 3300 km line like this moving 12GW of power. This is a little bit longer, but not by much.
Longer distance runs of AC can have a lot of losses though due to inductance, especially when they’re close to large conductive masses (like seawater or earth).
DC requires expensive conversion equipment to get back to AC for the grid.
AC is cheap for short runs. Usually AC vs DC high voltage starts to be equally cost effective around the several hundred miles of buried lines, and a clear winner around the 1000 mile range (efficiency and capex wise).
HVDC can also allow grid balancing when disparate grids are connected (different frequencies and voltages for instance).
The longest submarine HVDC line today is something like 600 km. There are no UHVDC submarine lines.
Using the 3.5% per 1000 km factor. Plus, of course, conversion and voltage stepping losses at both ends.
This is NOT technology is GEOPOLITICS, and it sucks!
This is just the brexiters bending backward to not be part of Europe. It feels like a socially incapable person leaving a party where (s)he was wanted and esteemed because (s)he has deep trust issues. Or more likely, because (s)he can't sit at an Arthurian round table of equals. Wishing to be the top dog or nothing.