A project to power Britain using solar farms thousands of miles away in the Sahara is moving a step closer to fruition as its backers prepare to commission the world’s biggest cable-laying ship.

The 700ft vessel will lay four parallel cables linking solar and wind farms spread across the desert in Morocco with a substation in Alverdiscott, a tiny village near the coast of north Devon.

Once completed, the scheme is expected to deliver about 3.6 gigawatts of electricity to the UK’s national grid – equating to about 8pc of total power demand.

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The Xlinks scheme involves laying cables carrying high voltage direct current power along the coasts of Spain, Portugal and France, coming ashore in North Africa.

There, they will connect with seven solar farms and up to 1,000 wind turbines built across an area of Moroccan desert roughly the size of greater London.

The expected energy output is slightly more than the power to be generated by the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant, which is predicted to cost around £46bn when completed in the early 2030s – more than double the cost of Xlinks.

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The ship will be owned by Xlinks’s sister company, XLCC, which is also building a factory at Hunterston in Scotland to manufacture the 10,000 miles of cable.

The factory, adjacent to the town’s closed nuclear power stations, was granted planning permission last year and awarded a £9m Scottish Enterprise grant towards its £1.4bn cost.

Its centrepiece will be a massive 600-foot tower in which the cable will be coated in layers of insulation before being coiled onto giant reels for loading into the cable-laying vessel.