Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

https://www.pv-tech.org/australian-government-approves-aapowerlink-project-to-export-solar-to-singapore/

by wmstack • 2 years ago

168 286 2 years ago

ggm2• 2 years ago

Eh, Factually correct (the best kind) but to be a little more specific:

"... Renewable energy developer Sun Cable has secured approval from the Australian government for the Australian element of its Australia-Asia Power Link (AAPowerLink) interconnector. ..."

So they have licence to make the PV farm, and to cable it to a head-end, and to run HVDC to the edge of Australian Exclusive Maritime Zone.

What happens after that is still subject to other people.

There's hope of a domestic customer as well. That's important because the location is pretty unpopulated and otherwise under-developed. Prospects for onshore HVDC to customers are low right now: the closest thing is a service called "Copperstring" targetting the mining/metals industry being done in Qld but its about 1000km away and there are few customers except at the end of a long line

That aside, Darwin and Port infra will be there but on the normalised "3 million homes" model of scaling Darwin is 60,000 homes or less.

dyauspitr5• 2 years ago

Edge of its exclusive zone is still 200 miles away from its coastline. That’s no joke though it only about 10% of the way to Singapore.

ggm2• 2 years ago

Realistically the first big sell is Indonesia. No cable to Singapore will make sense but it transits Indonesian waters and you would think a willing buyer and seller is there. Shorter path so less transmission losses.

gdiamos2• 2 years ago

How much copper would you need for a 4,300km 2GW subsea cable?

jillesvangurp• 2 years ago

That depends. It could be that they use aluminum instead. Apparently that's quite common in HVDC cables and interesting for cost reasons.

ben_w2• 2 years ago

Aluminium is almost as good by cross section, much cheaper, and the global (mainly Chinese) production is sufficient for a global (40 megameter) multi-terrawatt power grid every 18 months or so.

And yes, I did do the maths; and also yes it's really just China at the "global terrawatt" scale (they've become a dominant aluminium supplier), but a much smaller distance and power rating is probably fine even if China doesn't sell you the metal.

bigiain7• 2 years ago

Interestingly, Australia is amongst the world's biggest exporters of Bauxite, which pretty much just needs electricity to turn it into Aluminium.

Tade06• 2 years ago

At this length aluminium would have been used instead most likely.

With a typical HVDC line not exceeding 1200mm2 conductor cross section it's about 13k tonnes, so 0,025% of global aluminium production.

raverbashing• 2 years ago

not exceeding 1200m2 conductor cross section

Technically right but I think you mean 1200mm2 (a radius of approx 20mm)

gdiamos2• 2 years ago

At $1.127/lb of aluminum that only comes out to a bit less than $30,000 for the raw materials. That's astounding.

55555• 2 years ago

~65,000 tons of copper, which would cost about $515 million dollars or maybe a billion after being turned into wires. These numbers are from ChatGPT which is good at figuring out amounts needed but useless at figuring out real industrial-scale prices.

jibes21• 2 years ago

Can someone explain how this makes sense economically, isn't it really expensive and lossy to transport electricity such a long distance?

Maakuth2• 2 years ago

You double the voltage and halve the resistance. With longer cables you can invest more in more expensive stuff at the ends to deal with the high voltage.

left-struck2• 2 years ago

Resistance stays the same, loss due to resistance goes down. I’m not sure it halves either, it might be better than halving but I’m not sure myself.

Edit: Basic power loss formula is P=I^2R, so yes power loss is divided by 4 for a 2x increase in voltage assuming the target power delivered is held constant.

dzonga• 2 years ago

yeah - dumb question from me as well. won't a lot of power be lost during transmission ?

What material would they use for the cables at those vast distances to make the numbers work ?

danielheath• 2 years ago

Obligatory jwz post on the topic: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/

adrianN3• 2 years ago

HVDC has reasonable losses over very long distances and solar is extremely cheap. I believe aluminum is used for these cables.

dyauspitr5• 2 years ago

Sun shines for free once the initial infra is set up. Using HVDC at 1100 kV you could transfer up to 65% of the original power which doesn’t sound terrible.

79522• 2 years ago

There is a price difference between the place you buy the electricity and the place you sell it. That pays for the debt that funded construction. As long as that price difference is high enough it makes financial sense.

Djdjur7373bb• 2 years ago

Does it actually make economic sense to run a cable large enough for that kind of power from Australia to Singapore?

I would have guessed there must be enough domestic customers or in Indonesia that would make more sense.

rv3392• 2 years ago

I'm unsure about Indonesia, but domestic customers in that region would be pretty limited. The closest major power users would be in Queensland (>1000km) away.

gonzo412• 2 years ago

Data Centers, Green Steel production. Power == Opportunities. This is such a massive win for the environment.

dyauspitr5• 2 years ago

Indonesia probably has enough land for its own panels.

defrost5• 2 years ago

Indonesia is ~ 17 thousand islands, many steep equatorial jungled volcanic slopes and at 275.5 million is the fourth highest population for a country globally.

Land is in tight demand with food a priority over panels and issues that may not be apparent (clear slopes leads to instability, and keeping them clear is a Sisyphean task, etc).

richrichie2• 2 years ago

Singapore with a native population of about 4 million has reserves of about $1 trillion. They can afford to splurge to claim green/net-zero status.

Shopping calculations for them need not be about economic cost benefit analysis.

eru31• 2 years ago

Shopping calculations for them need not be about economic cost benefit analysis.

But there's also no good reason not to apply cost/benefit analysis.

Singapore with a native population of about 4 million has reserves of about $1 trillion. They can afford to splurge to claim green/net-zero status.

Of all numbers to bring up here, why did you pick foreign exchange reserves? GDP or wealth might be more relevant?

snoxy• 2 years ago

Aussie politicians are too busy propping up coal and proposing unrealistic nuclear solutions to seriously focus on renewables.

chii• 2 years ago

proposing unrealistic nuclear solutions to seriously focus on renewables.

they're doing unrealistic nuclear proposals, because they know it takes a long time to ramp up, and in the mean time, their buddies' investments in the coal industry gets time to exit and profit properly. It's designed to prevent losses in fossil fuel investments.

Not to mention that australian nuclear cannot be profitable imho - not when solar is so cheap. Their current proposals for nuclear basically requires taxpayer subsidies.

preisschild• 2 years ago

Nuclear power plants, which have been successfully used for decades, are “unrealistic” now?

jbsimpson2• 2 years ago

If we had the renewables to replace the coal politicians would love it to retire in a heartbeat. The reason it’s sticking it around longer is because politicians fear the backlash from blackouts and high prices more than the backlash from the bad PR of delaying closures of coal.

londons_explore7• 2 years ago

Power cables are getting cheaper and cheaper. The expensive part used to be the voltage conversion stations at the ends, but with mass production of MOSFETs for EV's these have now become far cheaper than the JFET's and other exotic silicon that used to be used.

In turn, that means voltages can be higher, letting one use more of the cheaper PVC or XLPE insulating material and less expensive aluminium for the same amount of energy delivered a large number of kilometers.

To be honest, I don't think we're many decades away from the cable+conversion stations themselves cost being irrelevant, and the administration costs, land purchase costs, etc dominating.

Kuinox2• 2 years ago

What material is made the power cable ? I thought copper was getting more and more expensive ?

ikekkdcjkfke• 2 years ago

Would they be using AC or DC? I heard that very long cables using AC can be more lossy

bhy• 2 years ago

Why higher voltages can result in cheaper insulation materials? Wouldn’t it be the opposite?

coryrc2• 2 years ago

The expensive part used to be the voltage conversion stations at the ends, but with mass production of MOSFETs for EV's these have now become far cheaper than the JFET's and other exotic silicon that used to be used.

Why do you believe these things are related?

HVDC lines operate in the hundreds-of-kilovolts range. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink operates at 400kV. There are no MOSFETs or JFETs directly involved in stepping down that power.

christophilus• 2 years ago

My very first thought was: that cable gets snipped in wartime.

Not a big deal, if your grid can handle the loss, but this certainly can’t be the gameplan for the bulk of your power.

roenxi6• 2 years ago

While Singapore is a surprisingly martial country, if they get into a war with anyone in SEA they're running a very real risk of being destroyed. Indonesia alone has 5x their GDP and 20x their population. There isn't much difficulty choosing which city to target first when going up against Singapore either.

In Singapore's situation, they can probably invest assuming that they are not in a military conflict with anyone. If they get into a war with anyone who can cut that cable they will be returning to the stone age anyway. If Indonesia objects to them they will go, if someone with the power to coerce Indonesia objects to them they're in deep trouble.

bigiain7• 2 years ago

I recall reading Singapores energy rules say this cable can't supply more then 15% of Singapore's requirements, presumably to protect against that.

maxglute• 2 years ago

Singapore has no strategic depth anyway, becoming dependent on importing power isn't some extra vunerable vector vs building domestic generation that likely can't be protected long term. Current is Singapore military vs region is like PRC:TW in the 90s... back then TW with US equipment was one of the more potent forces in the region and could stomp far larger/poorer countries with inferior hardware. But advanced equipment can only scale so far vs quantity, and as rest of ASEAN gets wealthier they're going to build out more modern capabilties, at scales that rich but small Singapore won't have the resources to defend against. If anything integration with AU, with military infra (and future US B21s) is probably more secure / geopolitical hedge against other's meddling.

leoedin• 2 years ago

Yeah - from a purely technical point of view it seems strange that you'd run a power cable 2000 miles to Singapore to service 4 million people, running alongside the coast of Bali, Java and Sumatra - population 210 million.

Presumably those in Singapore have a lot more buying power though. And the politics are more favourable for big capital investment projects.

gizajob• 2 years ago

Yeah, they also have zero room left so I guess the option was between more dirty power stations in Malaysia or this. Seems like a wise, forward-looking initiative.

eru31• 2 years ago

I would have guessed there must be enough domestic customers or in Indonesia that would make more sense.

Australia is a big place. The northern tip of Australia, where this project is based, isn't really that much further from Singapore than from the Australian population centres in the South East of the continent.

Indonesia is much poorer than Singapore, and has awfully inefficient bureaucracy and regulatory environment.

angled• 2 years ago

Not really? The company behind this, SunCable, has some history:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/billionaire-cannon-b...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-11/sun-cable-enters-admi...

I guess MCB found a way to make it work pending future investment that may not occur until 2027: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-21/suncable-receives-env...

The approval paves the way for the next phase of development to deliver industrial-scale electricity to customers. But it still has some way to go, with a final investment decision not expected until 2027.

and

However, SunCable still needs to negotiate Indigenous land use agreements with a number of different traditional owner groups along the transmission line route to Darwin.

hunglee2• 2 years ago

Australia is going to have make it Rd2 of being an energy commodity superpower. 40 years of exporting coal to China, it can look forward to 1000's years of export solar to APAC.

nroets2• 2 years ago

Technology is progressing so fast that something like space based solar or fusion power will replace terrestrial solar within 100 years.

stavros5• 2 years ago

Why? When will it be cheaper to deploy in space than in some remote area somewhere?

audunw• 2 years ago

Space based solar might not take a form where we just put mirrors in space to boost the output of existing terrestrial solar cells. The benefit is that the receivers on the ground can receive energy directly from the sun when the sun is up, and the space mirrors can be used to provide light to areas that are completely dark in winter.

I don’t think microwave beaming is ever viable

Most fusion concepts are thermal power plants. Those have inherent downsides that have nothing to do with the nuclear energy providing the heat for the steam turbines. So they will never fully replace renewables. Helion’s concept might work. But that remains to be seen.

nsonha3• 2 years ago

Once we start making these predictions with no single one of such project even planned, then people start predicting about all sort of bat shit crazy ideas "within the next 100 years" and there is no philosophical razor we can employ to discern them from the legit ones.

twelvechairs• 2 years ago

What advantage does Australia have over other Asia pacific countries to justify the infrastructure costs? Only Singapore where space is at a premium. Other countries can generally find space (even if over the water) and their worker costs for maintenance will be far lower.

rozenmd• 2 years ago

Huge amounts of land with stable sunny weather.

grecy2• 2 years ago

All while Australian's themselves pay astronomical prices for power

Aachen4• 2 years ago

Surely solar panels are affordable with typical Australian household incomes? And much more effective even in southern Tasmania at 45°S as compared to southern Finland at 60°N (where they're apparently cost-effective since they're building solar farms).

If they feel their electricity provider is screwing with them, why not make their own? Probably even with batteries it would pay for itself given the ROI I'd guess panels have there

Eumenes• 2 years ago

China isn't gonna run out of coal anytime soon.

RamRodification• 2 years ago

The render of the planned solar panel array looks like sci-fi art. Very cool (hot?).

Maybe there are already vast fields of solar panels like that, and I just haven't seen it before?

oxym0ron• 2 years ago

There are actually already fields like that. Look at the ones in China or the US. Scaling it up is the next step.

hengheng• 2 years ago

From the article, it looks like they are installing 20 GWp of solar cells. ("peak power" that is only achieved when the sun is right above the solar cells with no atmosphere in between). The plan seems to be to store 36-42 GWh, and to deliver 2 GW max.

That makes for a 20h energy storage at full power, and a big enough power reserve to recharge that storage during the day while delivering at full power. Likely a reserve for morning/evening/clouds. Easy to add more storage.

So, it's a 2 GW power link, not a 20 GW power link. It's a 20 GWp site, and that's impressive too. At 200 Wp (STC) per sq m, that is 100M m², or a 6 mile square not counting any access roads. Huge, but if five of these is all it takes to power Singapore, then I guess we're looking at a bright future.

wmstack• 2 years ago

So, it's a 2 GW power link, not a 20 GW power link

Yup, my bad. Title is wrong but I can't change it now. I was looking for quick figures and saw the solar capacity numbers and put them. It seems only about 1.75 GW are actually planned to go through that link.

MaKey• 2 years ago

Maybe @dang can help with the title

dyauspitr5• 2 years ago

Yeah when you look at the amount of road, rail and underwater cabling humans have done over the past 50 years, five of those seem easy.

stavros5• 2 years ago

I guess we're looking at a bright future.

We have to, otherwise the solar panels wouldn't work.

KoolKat23• 2 years ago

36-42GWh storage capacity is absolutely huge. From what I can tell, like ten times the size of existing storage plants around the world.

tdrz4• 2 years ago

This sounds good! I don't know much about electricity, can anyone tell me if such an undersea power cable could be technically feasible between Europe and North America? Possibly taking a detour through Iceland which has significant geothermal resources.

I understand that it would take much more than just the cable between the two continents to make this work - right now there are issue on the continents themselves to get the electricity from one place to another. But with the sun shining most of the time on one of those two continents and with other (hopefully renewable) energy sources on either side of the pond, we might get to have green and cheap energy!

topherhunt• 2 years ago

This is totally unresearched, but my gut says it would be much higher ROI for Europe + North America to independently source solar from their respective nearby deserts, paired with batteries?

tdrz4• 2 years ago

I would hope Europe has learned a lesson not to depend on unreliable partners for its energy.

csomar2• 2 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELMED_interconnector#:~:text....

This is already in the works and secured financing recently. It’s a smaller link but it’s a start. Also Tunisia trade electricity with Libya and Algeria; so technically they could be selling electricity to Europe through that link.

Tade06• 2 years ago

Exactly such a project is currently being explored, while a UK-Morocco line is continuing development:

https://www.current-news.co.uk/uk-us-transatlantic-interconn...

Weirdly enough the latter is projected to cost less than the now infamous Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant.

littlestymaar• 2 years ago

Given how well the Australian project is going (it's a long running project that's already late before even starting) I'm convinced that this project will have the same woes which comes from the mere fact of being massive long-term infrastructure projects and have nothing to do with nuclear being special.

By the way, do you know what cost the most money on the HPC project? Loan interests, by a very large margin. Because of the risk of project failure given the lack of government guarantees, they had to borrow at a baffling 9% interest rate in a world if zero interest rate. This is the insanity that drove the cost to the sky, not the engineering side of things.

joha42703• 2 years ago

Real projects has a way of encountering unexpected troubles in a way thay paper ones dont.

On top of that there is the energy security problem, even if Morocco is less likey than Russia to try and play tricks.

I wish them all luck, but we can't forget the advantages projects has before leaving Excel.

xbmcuser• 2 years ago

Why would you go west to America when you have Africa below? Batteries are already cheap enough and getting cheaper that you can store 12 hours of electricity

eru31• 2 years ago

If you just want to move energy between day and night, batteries can also do that job.

m2f2• 2 years ago

Significant turning tables moment when big bully China aims at being the sole APAC superpower. That might explain why Singapore are interested and why 4200km of cable aren't such a big issue.

boffinAudio2• 2 years ago

Who do you think is manufacturing the solar panels? Certainly not Australians.

csomar2• 2 years ago

Not sure how a 4200km cable is more secure than a few gas tanks. I am actually surprised they’d go with this as it’s impossible to monitor the whole range of the cable.

energy1232• 2 years ago

Gas imports from Indonesia can be cut off in exactly the same way so there's no large difference.

seatac76• 2 years ago

Will be easy to cut so this isn’t really secure.

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

I'd probably prefer to get cheaper power here in Australia, but whatever - no decisions are ever made here to benefit the Australian people - it's always to help some vested interest or corporate interest or foreign interest or donor to the politicians.

So presumably this whole bit of climate theater has a lovely feel good story.

eru31• 2 years ago

As far as Australia is concerned, this is a private investment project.

And it does not prevent any other private investment projects to generate and sell green electricity to Australians. Australia isn't exactly short of sunshine, and the Chinese will happily sell you all the solar panels that you could ever want.

i386• 2 years ago

Not sure why this is downvoted. Economic activity should be enjoyed by the commons. For example LNG being exported UNDER international value and Aussies buying it at international prices is idiotic.

DavidPiper• 2 years ago

Hell yeah! So cool to see Sun Cable progressing.

Australia is obscenely well-positioned to be a solar energy powerhouse. So much open and uninhabited land, geologically stable and uniquely suited climate with a ton of sun all year round.

Could have done it sooner with more political will, etc, etc. But I'm so over the whole renewables and climate change debate (still very much alive here sadly). We're way beyond the time for talking and into the time for action, and seeing this project pull us into a more sustainable world is awesome.

jaimex2• 2 years ago

4,300km of subsea cable...

I'm must completely be missing something. We can't get renewables into our own grid let alone over the hemisphere.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/nem-watch/

Sabinus• 2 years ago

It's vastly more simple to run one cable through the ocean than run heaps of high voltage lines between all the remote renewable generation sites and the consumers. Even with the solar built into a suburb, you need to built much thicker connections to transfer it to other consumers than what you do in the old generation system. Distributed grids are complicated.

vlasky• 2 years ago

I'm Aussie and I can't believe this Sun Cable project is being taken seriously by our government.

The longest submarine power cable in the world - the Viking Link - is a mere 756 km long and cost US$2.2bn to build. Sun Cable calls for a 4,200km submarine cable to be built!

I do not expect the construction cost to scale linearly and I shudder to imagine the maintenance difficulties and expenses.

Back in December 2015, Australia's 290km long undersea Basslink cable broke causing the 2016 Tasmanian energy crisis. It took 6 months to get it working again. Basslink eventually went into receivership on 12 November 2021.

Something to ponder.

gonzo412• 2 years ago

Tasmanian energy crisis was because of a drought, not because the cable was cut. Tassie exports energy and the power company had lowered the dam levels selling power to Victoria that year expecting regular winter rain. That rain didn't happen. That, then combined with the line fault caused the issue. In fact, the suspected cause of the line issue was that the power company Tassie Hydro zapped the export line with too much current trying to make money from Victoria. That combined with the lowering of dams, perfect storm of greed and bad luck.

In addition, the boats that service these cables are mostly in the northern hemisphere, where most of the undersea cables exist. So there was a ~5 month wait on the repair. I'd expect a 4000Km cable to have it's own fleet of boats for servicing.

jbsimpson2• 2 years ago

When Tassie dams get low, they import power from the mainland. It’s a common seasonal thing. Drought + Basslink outage had the gov buying and running diesel gen at huge cost to keep the grid running. The Basslink outage made a problem a crisis.

cjbgkagh• 2 years ago

Why would it be superlinear instead of sublinear?

I can understand that the combined probability of breakage along the line could be a maintenance problem but the construction cost should have many amortizable components that deliver some sort of economics of scale.

I haven’t done the math so I have no idea on actual viability or if it’s a good idea or not.

rmbeard• 2 years ago

It's a bad idea.

boringg• 2 years ago

Its a great sound byte for the politicains. Politicians aren't known for the economic and business acumen. Sound bytes and promise of jobs get them elected.

Don't know the details of this project but if the cable is subsidized by the government it doesn't matter if it scales super or sublinearly, taxpayers are on the hook.

threeseed• 2 years ago

None of this really applies to Australia.

a) Politicians are typically more educated than say in the US.

b) They rely heavily on the public service who are experienced to do the heavy lifting.

c) The jobs aren't in the areas that matter for Federal elections.

79522• 2 years ago

These kind of projects are getting proposed because the business case is painfully simple. Buy electricity cheap and sell it high. Its arbitrage. The price difference needs to be just enough to pay for the debt that funded construction.

fidotron• 2 years ago

That is nothing. Try Chile to China:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/11/15/chile-wants-to-export...

jfoster• 2 years ago

How could that even work? In some areas, surely the Pacific Ocean is deeper than any humans or deep ocean vehicles have ever been to? So would the cable be hanging across undersea chasms, or do they need to find a depth where it can be placed?

Also, is it just so heavy that it doesn't need to be secured?

hn_throwaway_992• 2 years ago

A great example of bullshit megaprojects that governments announce with no real intention of ever implementing. I searched and tried to find something recent about this project. Pretty much everything I found was around the announcement in Nov 2021 - the latest article I found was this one from Jan 2022, https://dialogue.earth/en/energy/50155-chile-underwater-cabl... , which states the project "does not yet have feasibility studies or a form of financing".

I also would like a magic pony.

qbxk• 2 years ago

They just began running a team of barges down Lake Champlain to lay 546km of cable from Quebec to NYC for $4.5B

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champlain_Hudson_Power_Express

Retric2• 2 years ago

You misunderstand the costs involved. The cable is cheap per km, the cost is largely HVDC equipment at either end.

This is why they aren’t breaking things up into several shorter hops to various islands on the way.

energy1232• 2 years ago

It's not up to the government to determine cost feasibility of a private project.

viewtransform• 2 years ago

DW did a good summary of the Sun Cable Australia-Singapore project https://youtu.be/42b6xJFUSss?t=206

20GW solar farm, 42GWh battery, 3 cables totalling 12,900km of HVDC cable, $23 billion cost.

anitil• 2 years ago

Perhaps it's similar to the high speed rail projects that get announced and quietly shelved every election season?

mikrotikker4• 2 years ago

Are you a fan of the show Utopia?

kinj28• 2 years ago

Curious if like internet cable - can there be redundancy built?

Also the way data packets go - they can go literally from any of the lines and get assembled together somewhere in the network layer. But same doesn’t hold true for 3 phase power. So same that works for internet wouldn’t be applicable for power distribution.

EnigmaFlare• 2 years ago

The DC Cook Straight cable in New Zealand has 3 cables with one spare and one redundant. It can use the earth as a return path though, not sure if you could do that all the way to Singapore. DC doesn't have phases so it's not 3-phase, same with the Sun Cable.

aryehof• 2 years ago

… I can't believe this Sun Cable project is being taken seriously by our government.

It passed government environmental requirements, a milestone for the (private sector) project’s promoters. Articles should be read a touch more carefully and cynically before jumping to outrage surely?

giantg2• 2 years ago

I wonder if there are non-energy uses for this that aren't being disclosed. Perhaps one could use undersea power cable to inductively sense large metal objects that are submerged nearby.

monkeycantype• 2 years ago

Somewhere there is a doco about the guys who lay these cables, I’ve forgotten the name, does anyone know it? It has a focus on the guy who has his hand on the lever that controls the speed of the spool the cable is rolling off. This guy needs to have mastered the mysterious art of ‘slack control’, the intuitive understanding of exactly how much cable to drop down to the depths of the Atlantic. In my memory of the doco there are only a handful of people who do this professionally, and it’s not worth the hundreds of millions it would cost you to figure out what they know not to just hire them at eye watering rates to lift and lower the control lever guided by the secrets they know which you don’t

I feel like I saw it at imax, but it seems an odd topic for an imax movie?

Arbalest5• 2 years ago

I keep seeing stuff about the viability of the cable being laid. The thing that gets me though, is the timezone shift around peak solar generation is the wrong way around. In Australia at least, peak demand is in the evening, when people get home and turn on their ACs, or cooking devices etc. I don't know about the demand patterns in Singapore, but given their heavy use of AC, I imagine their demand for power does not peter off in the evening much.

Meanwhile the peak of solar generation around midday in Australia is being sent off to Singapore in the morning who are a couple hours behind us. Presumably the morning is when the least AC will be used there. By the evening in Singapore, it'll be night in Central Australia, meaning there will still have to be plenty of peaking generation or, will need a massive ton of batteries which has still not quite there for grid scaling.

onethought10• 2 years ago

There are batteries included as part of this project. So I don't think time really matters.

Arbalest5• 2 years ago

Yes, but will it wipe out the advantage of solar by adding cost to the generation capacity? As I said, batteries still aren't cheap, and their replacement lifetime is still not good. We could rely on future technology, but is that a sound investment plan?

If this project is viable, then it'll probably be more viable to have a massive solar farm coming from India, where the timezone shift is in the correct direction, and it would outcompete Australia.

worthless-trash5• 2 years ago

Perth time == Singapore time. I bet you're use to living on the east coast.

Arbalest5• 2 years ago

Central timezone, actually. Perth is not part of the NEM, and pretty sure the plan for this is coming out of the Northern Territory

richardw• 2 years ago

This is still backed by Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian, isn’t it? Not mentioned in article but:

“May 2023, a consortium led by Cannon-Brookes' Grok Ventures won the bid to acquire Sun Cable,[7] with the takeover finalised on 7 September 2023. The revised plans involve supplying electricity to Darwin by 2030, and to Singapore a few years thereafter. ”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

jaidan2• 2 years ago

I am curious about a couple of things to do with this project. Given the solar panels will cover about 30,000 acres of land [0], and a factory is being built to manufacture the panels (because there are so many), how will decommissioning of the solar farm be done at end of life? How does one process that many panels in an environmentally friendly way? It sounds like another factory will need to be built to process the waste.

I hope that the decommissioning of this kind of solar farm is better managed thant the likes of the Northern Endeavour FPSO, where Woodside offloaded it to a small company to dodge the decommissioning costs of the field, leaving the taxpayer to foot the bill[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link [1] https://www.industry.gov.au/mining-oil-and-gas/oil-and-gas/o...

evolve2k• 2 years ago

Give it a rest already with the default cynicism, we need more bold record breaking large green infrastructure bets to help get us out of this mess that years of conservative policy has caused in the first place.

Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

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