The undersea electricity link that joins Morocco and Spain is about to get a close check-up. According to Morocco World News, which cites Spain’s La Razón, the Spanish company Advanced Cargo Services & Marina (ACSM) will inspect the cables that connect the two countries’ power grids.
What the link looks like
The connection runs for roughly 30 kilometers beneath the Strait of Gibraltar, at depths of up to about 640 meters, according to the report. It ties Morocco’s Fardioua station near Tangier to a substation in Tarifa, on Spain’s southern coast, using two circuits of 400-kilovolt cable.
Hespress English reported in April that Morocco’s national power utility ONEE and Spain’s grid operator Red Eléctrica had opened an international tender for the technical review, citing Spanish media. It described the work as routine maintenance made up of visual and structural checks, with the operation managed from Tangier. The same report said the link has been in service since the late 1990s under a 1993 bilateral agreement.
Why it matters
The cables are a key route for electricity exchanges between North Africa and Western Europe. Morocco has been scaling up renewable power, from solar to wind, and Hespress noted that the country is exploring further connections, including a possible direct cable to France, as it looks to export more clean electricity. No capacity expansion is planned for the existing link, the outlet said.
The inspection comes about a year after the April 2025 blackout that hit the Iberian Peninsula. Morocco World News said the stated goal is simply to review the condition of the infrastructure, and it did not tie the inspection to the cause of that outage.
Morocco’s energy build-out is also visible on land and water: see our report on Africa’s largest floating solar plant near Tanger Med.
No dates for the start or length of the inspection were given in the reports we reviewed.
Sources: Morocco World News; Hespress English
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