Morocco adds a French route to three European power links already in negotiation
France opened a call for expressions of interest in a direct Morocco interconnection on 16 July, six days before Reuters reported the $30 billion German subsea link had stalled. With a second Spanish link planned and a Portuguese one under study, Rabat is now negotiating four routes into Europe’s electricity market at once.
Morocco operates the only electricity interconnection between Africa and Europe currently running, through Spain, and it carried enough load last year to help Madrid recover from a national outage. A second Spanish connection is planned at 700MW alongside it, and a link to Portugal is under study at an investment that could reach €735 million, which means two of the four routes now in play involve a counterparty Morocco has already delivered for.
France became the third when Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu closed the Morocco-France High-Level Meeting in Rabat on 16 July by launching a call for expressions of interest in a direct interconnection, with the stated aim of identifying commercially viable routes for exporting Moroccan renewable electricity. Moroccan reporting refers to it as the Pont de la Méditerranée and describes a cable running from Nador in the north to the area around Marseille, bypassing Spain and the Iberian peninsula, a route first surfaced in February under the name Qantara Med when the British developer Xlinks was reported to be exploring it through Elemental Power, the French subsidiary it established in 2024. Leïla Benali, Morocco’s Minister of Energy Transition, had met the French special envoy Gérard Mestrallet on the file in April.
The German proposal is the largest of the four and the furthest from a decision. Sila Atlantik, a company created in Germany for the purpose, would lay two high voltage subsea cables of roughly 4,800 kilometres along the coasts of Portugal, France, Belgium and the Netherlands to the German North Sea coast, carrying two by 1.8GW and drawing on as much as 15GW of Moroccan solar and wind to deliver around 26 terawatt hours a year, close to 5% of German demand. Its developers put the cost near $30 billion and the load factor above 7,000 full load hours, enough to displace up to 2.7GW of fossil generation, with battery storage carrying supply past twenty hours a day. Former EnBW and Ørsted executives are running it.
Political backing arrived in February, when State Secretary Frank Wetzel at the German economy ministry wrote to Morocco’s investment minister welcoming the project’s ambition and potential, and Deutsche Bahn, the largest single consumer of electricity in Germany, wrote separately to say Moroccan solar and wind would be an attractive supply option. E.ON and Uniper have both examined it.
Rabat has attached conditions that four sources described to Reuters in July as the reason the project has not moved, wanting an intergovernmental agreement formally endorsed by Berlin before it commits, and wanting the cable to run in both directions so that Morocco can draw European power when it needs to rather than only sell into it. The land has not been committed, the financing and the investment decision remain open, and the project sits at exploratory stage in the European grid planners’ ten year network development plan.
Xlinks is the reason those terms are being asked for at all, having proposed 11.5GW of Moroccan generation and a 3.6GW cable of some 3,800 kilometres to southwest England at around €29 billion before London declined a state-backed power purchase agreement in 2025, after which the developer withdrew its United Kingdom permit application on 1 July and turned to the continent.
Morocco’s energy ministry told Reuters that regional integration is a key pillar of the country’s energy transition strategy and pointed to plans to deepen electricity links with other European partners. The French call for expressions of interest is open, and the Portuguese study continues.
