A foreign reader will sympathise with Louis Dave’s complaints, as long as this reader doesn’t bother to ascertain what’s happening on that “faraway land”.
In the desert region where the XLinks project is expected to be established, near Tantan, the state has allocated 150,000 hectares to the company.
For the company and its board’s chairman, this is merely “a vast desert and a long coastline,” but not for the communities and residents.
This is an extensive geographical area that includes land dedicated to small-scale farming and herding mobility. What will become of them? Neither the company nor the authorities seem to care.
Jobs
The herders will be pushed out of these lands, just as similar displacement had previously caused clashes between these nomads and those settled in the Souss Basin.
This integrated strategy will inevitably destroy the lifestyles associated with small-scale food production, including agriculture and pasture, and disrupt the desert wildlife.
One of the potential sites for the XLinks project is the mouth of Oued Chbika, near Tantan, where undersea cables from the United Kingdom will connect to the mainland.
This area is not an empty desert. It is home to the nomadic Reguibat and Tekna tribes who traditionally roam across large areas of the desert in search of pastures for their sheep and camels.
Lewis said his company would provide 10,000 jobs in Morocco. This sounds like good news for a country where unemployment has become widespread, owing to the policies of economic adjustment imposed by other countries, including Britain.
Livelihoods
However, Lewis doesn’t mention two aspects: the nature of these jobs and the social and environmental costs of the projects that will generate them.
The renewable energy projects that European countries want to establish in Morocco are capital-intensive projects that create thousands of jobs only during the initial construction phase.
After the initial build only a handful of technical positions are then available, to be mostly allocated to people from outside the regions where these projects are located.
Moreover, the majority of these thousands of jobs are temporary and outsourced through subcontracting firms, in line with Morocco’s labour law, which was amended in 2004 at the behest of the European Union and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Let us compare the 10,000 jobs promised by Lewis with the destruction of thousands of livelihoods and the closure of passageways for herders in order to fully grasp the social and environmental cost that the XLinks project threatens to impose on the region.
Energy
The example of the Noor Ouarzazate solar power station confirms this analysis. What resulted from it were only a few small agricultural projects for women, construction jobs, or occasional tasks like washing mirrors under the scorching desert sun.
Meanwhile, the wider region has become a military installation with watchtowers to protect the site.
Boris Schinke from Germanwatch, a non-profit organization based in Bonn (Germany) focusing on environmental and development issues, noted that there was “widespread disappointment” regarding the community’s benefit from the project.
Lewis wants to portray it as a service to UK residents, describing the project as a “promise to reduce household bills, cut emissions”.
But his statement underlines that profit is what matters most. The title of the article in The Telegraph containing Lewis’s statements was: “Back our £25bn green energy project or we’ll take it overseas.”
Light
To achieve his goal, Lewis applies pressure by suggesting the possibility that international investors, who have entered the project’s funding line, might flee.
He further intensified his pressure, saying: “However, XLinks could decide to take the project to another country amid growing frustration over the time it is taking to get the green light from the government.”
So, the promises to provide nine million British homes with clean energy have evaporated. The real beneficiaries are revealed to be international investors, with government financial backing, who use the threat of moving the project overseas to get what they want.
According to the article published in The Telegraph, it takes less than a second for green electricity to be transported from the southern Moroccan city of Tantan to the UK (4,000 kilometers). Lewis boasted: “This is sub-second power. Literally, you switch a light on and it’s there.”
Profits
Just as before, a car was operated in less than a second by the people of the Global North because it was filled with imported (seized) oil from Africa and other countries of the Global South.
The XLinks project is expected to generate 3.6 gigawatts of electrical power, according to the company. Just one company will generate 3.6 gigawatts of power – this is a quarter of the total capacity established in Morocco in 2022, of which 70 per cent comes from coal!
However, Lewis “rejects the suggestion that there is something morally questionable about exploiting the natural resources of a developing country to decarbonise Western industrialised nations”, as he stated in his article in The Telegraph.
Foreign investors need to stop playing with the minds of their own people. A fair transition will certainly not emerge out of their profit portfolios, nor of their companies’ shares.
Planet
As such, what fuels the efforts of XLinx’s shareholders and board chairman is the profits promised by the clean energy market.
Lewis said: “[B]ecause demand is rising and there are only three suppliers across Europe … energy demand is expected to accelerate after 2030 because of electrification: You need to be building against that demand – now. You don’t want to be waiting”.
This is the bet. If the British government is not willing, Lewis will carry his investment portfolio to another country, as if renewable energy projects were just a pack of cigarettes rather than a vital institution for the life of a nation.
The people of Morocco, of the UK, and around the world will only find a way to their just transition when they break with the logic of profit-driven capitalism and build clean energy systems that respect our planet.
This Author
Ali Amouzai is an independent Moroccan researcher who works closely with the North Africa Programme at the Transnational Institute (TNI).
