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There are ambitious solar and wind projects planned for both the Northern Territory and the Pilbara in Western Australia. Photo: Shutterstock

Ambitious plan to power Singapore with world’s biggest solar farm ... 4,000km away in Australia

  • Electricity generated by solar farm in Australia’s Northern Territory would be exported via undersea cable
Energy

The desert outside Tennant Creek, deep in the Northern Territory, is not the most obvious place to build and transmit Singapore’s future electricity supply.

Though few in the southern states are yet to take notice, a group of Australian developers are betting that will change.

If they are right, it could have far-reaching consequences for Australia’s energy industry and what the country sells to the world.

Known as Sun Cable, it is promised to be the world’s largest solar farm. If developed as planned, a 10-gigawatt-capacity array of panels will be spread across 15,000 hectares and be backed by battery storage to ensure it can supply power around the clock.

Overhead transmission lines will send electricity to Darwin and plug into the Northern Territory grid. But the bulk would be exported via a high-voltage direct-current submarine cable snaking through the Indonesian archipelago to Singapore, which is more than 4,000km from Tennant Creek as the crow flies.

The developers say it will be able to provide one-fifth of the island city state’s electricity needs, replacing its increasingly expensive gas-fired power.

After 18 months in development, the A$20 billion Sun Cable development had a quiet coming out party three weeks ago at a series of events held to highlight the Northern Territory’s solar potential.

The idea has been embraced by the Northern Territory government and attracted the attention of the software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes, who is considering involvement through his Grok Ventures private investment firm.

The Northern Territory plan follows a similarly ambitious proposal for the Pilbara, where another group of developers are working on an even bigger wind and solar hybrid plant to power local industry and develop a green hydrogen manufacturing hub.

On Friday, project developer Andrew Dickson announced the scale of the proposed Asian Renewable Energy Hub had grown by more than a third, from 11GW to 15GW.

The skyline of Singapore. The Sun Cable plan could replace one-fifth of the city state’s electricity needs, currently filled by expensive gas-fired generation. File photo: Reuters

“To our knowledge, it’s the largest wind-solar hybrid in the world,” he said.

These developments are still at relatively early stages of planning. Both teams say it will be four years before they lock in finance, with production scheduled to start mid-to-late next decade.

But renewable energy watchers are cautiously optimistic they could help spark a new way of thinking about Australia’s energy exports – one that better aligns with the country’s commitment to the Paris climate agreement, rather than broadening a fossil fuel trade at odds with it.

Opponents to Australia taking significant action on the climate crisis often point out the country is responsible for about 1.4 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, placing it about 15th on a table of carbon-polluting nations.

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A recent report by science and policy institute Climate Analytics makes the case that this underplays Australia’s contribution, which increases by 5 per cent if fossil fuel exports are included.

The latter figure is expected to increase over the next decade. Australia is the world’s biggest exporter of coal and rivals Qatar as the leader in selling liquefied natural gas (LNG).

There is bipartisan support for a significant expansion of both industries, though government economists anticipate export earnings from coal will fall.

Sun Cable’s chief executive, David Griffin, is bullish about the possibility of his company helping power Singapore from the outback in less than a decade.

He said the project would use prefabricated solar cells to capture “one of the best solar radiance reserves on the planet”.

But he said the major transformation that makes the farm possible is the advent of high-voltage, direct-current submarine cable, which he described as the “greatest unsung technology development”.

Sun Cable’s underwater link to Singapore would run 3,800km.

“It is extraordinary technology that is going to change the flow of energy between countries. It is going to have profound implications and the extent of those implications hasn’t been widely identified,” Griffin said.

“If you have the transmission of electricity over very large distances between countries, then the flow of energy changes from liquid fuels – oil and LNG – to electrons. Ultimately, that’s a vastly more efficient way to transport energy. The incumbents just won’t be able to compete.”

Sun Cable’s backers believe Singapore, as a well-regulated electricity market that runs mostly on gas piped from Malaysia and Indonesia and shipped as LNG, is ripe for competition.

Across in the Pilbara, the Asian Renewable Energy Hub proposal has taken another tack. The developers – a consortium of InterContinental Energy, CWP Energy Asia, wind energy company Vestas and financiers at the Macquarie Group – began with a plan to send energy to Indonesia via sub-sea cable.

That has been dropped in favour of green hydrogen – a shift driven, Andrew Dickson said, by falling costs and growing international and local interest that suggests a much bigger market.

Dickson pointed to recent appraisals by the Australian chief scientist, Alan Finkel, and the International Energy Agency as evidence of hydrogen’s potential.

“People are realising, after several decades of promise, that now could be the time for it to be a thing,” he said.

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Roger Dargaville, a senior lecturer in renewable energy at Monash University and member of the Energy Transition Hub, underlined the amount of work that was going into examining what a future of clean exports would look like.

A recent project he was involved in suggested a 40-gigawatt sub-sea electricity cable into Indonesia – much larger than that initially proposed by the Asian Renewable Energy Hub – would be viable by 2035 if that country adopts a low emissions target.

Dargaville believes future exports will almost certainly be a mix of hydrogen, cabled electricity and minerals refined before shipment.

He said no one should underestimate the scale of what would be necessary to replace Australia’s existing fossil fuel industries (coal and LNG industries are worth more than A$100 billion a year and employ tens of thousands) and that the political and technological challenges will be significant.

But he stressed no one should mistake where international markets were taking us.

The only question is whether it is in the time frame climate scientists say is necessary. “It’s not really yes or no, it’s just when.”

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Solar farm aims to power Singapore 4,000km away
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