Why the mega plan to send Australian solar to Asia (almost) flopped

The idea was simple: why not use solar energy from Australia’s sunny and spacious north to power Singapore, which has no space for renewables of its own? The project is part of a growing push to build ‘interconnectors’, high voltage cables that can transport clean energy over vast distances. But after it almost collapsed last year, the question of whether this technology can take off on a global scale remains.

#planeta #supergrid #solarpower

We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.

Credits:
Reporter, video editor, graphics: Adam Baheej Adada
Supervising Editors: Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann, Kiyo Dörrer
Thumbnail: Em Chabridon

Read More:
Insights to Europe's interconnectors:

Principles for Interconnector Development:

On Smart grids:

Chapters:
00:00 A crazy idea
00:56 Why interconnectors are great
03:26 The Aussie dream
06:47 Politics and trust get in the way
09:02 Billionaire dramas
11:00 Conclusion

[DWPlanetA]

Do you think your country should be a part of a global supergrid, or do you prefer relying on local energy sources?

[Sussurrus]

Great vision, but for now how about Australia powering itself with renewables first? It's grid is as dirty as it gets.

[jb.]

I don't understand why such a project wouldn't aim first to power Australia with renewable energy. At present only 40% of the electricity in Australia comes from renewables. It would also avoid the technical issues of submarine cables and the potential sabotage risk of passing in third party territorial waters.

[jackred]

If anything sending solar power from Western to Eastern Australia would make much more sense, due to daylight gap. Western Australia would be daytime, and it would power the peak during the Eastern's evening. A similar thing is happening in China.

[chilliear]

My question is why go for Singapore when its so far away? Maybe hook up to the Indonesia mainland first and power Jakarta before heading to Singapore.

[GustavSvard]

How about splitting this gigaproject into separate projects for:
* Large scale solar power facilities with batteries in Australia.
* (if needed: better grid to connect across Australia)
* Power cables from Australia to Indonesia (especially Java)
* Power cables connecting through Indonesia up to Sumatra & Borneo
* Power cables from Indonesia to Singapore & Malaysia
and to make those power cables possible it'd be good to have a factory making them in Australia or ASEAN.

If doesn't all have to be in one project done by one company.

[shmookins]

Interesting.
But why not supply those cables to Australian cities first? That would be cheaper and would give the company time to learn and profit before the big stretch.

[flutieflambert]

First adopters are always at the fringe. 720p Plasma screens used to cost $25K and they weren’t large. Now they’re huge, cheap, ubiquitous and 4K, not 1080p. When Coltrane and Parker first hit the music scene, everyone marveled that each did the impossible. Four years later everyone was imitating them. These cables are inevitable. Not if, but when.

[Croz]

I think energy security concerns will usually plague big single point inter-connector projects like this. The EU's idea for solar from the Sahara was even more risky considering the political instability in the region. It's one thing for friendly neighbors to synchronize their grids and send a couple GW back and forth as needed, but this is on another level. Hydrogen is one option, perhaps even synthetic hydrocarbons to take advantage of better energy density. Countries will want a strategic reserve of energy that can keep things going for a few weeks in case of disruption. That could be a massive battery or pumped storage facility, but then you're losing a lot of the cost advantages of a more stable renewable energy source than what can be produced domestically.

[simonboland]

Two things: The sun cable problem is that energy generated in the Australia afternoon is not generated at peak times (i.e. evenings) in Singapore. This makes it less viable.
Also, two big egos with Twiggy Forrest and Cannon Brookes was never going to work. Forrest recently laid off 700 jobs in the green hydrogen division of Fortescue.

[tonychen]

The idea is dodgy in the first place if you are familiar with the countries involved. For example, Indonesia's power demand is projected to grow from 65 GW current demand to over 200 GW (this isn't that high, it's basically 5% increase annually over 25 years) in several decades. If the idea is to sell the solar power that Western Australia have in abundance, it makes way more sense to sell it to Indonesia and cut the length of the cable by half or even two thirds. Or if the idea is to sell solar power to Singapore, who's trying hard to reduce and even eliminate their gas-fueled power plants, it makes way more sense to open solar farms in Sumatra and Riau Islands that are right next to Singapore. While those islands are more densely populated that Western Australia, there are still plenty of areas that can be used for solar power. The cable needed then would've been just a hundred km long or at most two hundred.

Hence the questioning about whether the 12 thousand km long cable makes sense.

[Jecoopster]

This is so frustrating. Like, the engineering would work, but money and bureaucracy is getting in the way…

[karpuzye]

It is really weird how they didn't think about this very basic problem before investing 🤔

[ericrushine]

Isn't the solution to sunlinks problem to give Indonesia access to the power cables. Indonesia is a chain of islands that could greatly benefit from moving green energy between the islands, and the cables are the exact infrastructure they would need for that. They might even want to buy some excess from Australia or sell to Singapore and beyond.

[treefarm]

There was quite a lot of work on using thermal energy in SW Queensland and nearby, but it was ultimately decided it was too expensive to cable it to the east coast.

[meerkathero]

20 GW is times more than all of NT needs. A 20 GW connection to Darwin is quite useless as long as there is not further evacuation possible. Currently, another company is developing a multi GW hydrogen project on Tiwi island, just north of Darwin. There are many more who are developing projects in Australia. The amount of GW scale solar and wind and hydrogen projects in Northern Territory and Western Australia is incredible. None of these projects finished or started construction, all in an early development stage.

[meerkathero]

Singapore is importing electric power through interconnectors already and is adding new ones. However, EMA (the responsible authority for power imports in Singapore) is not considering Suncable. Instead there are agreements in place for low carbon power imports with companies in Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam. Additional Singapore is installing nowadays a lots of PV and BESS in the own territory, the target of 2 GW PV until 20230 seems to be achievable. Many sources, not a single source, is better risk management and cheaper on the long run.

[simonyoung]

It’s absolutely mad that the concept wasn’t proven within Australia first and enabled low to super low tariffs for Australian citizens and businesses . This could have driven investment to then enable the conduit to be laid to other countries so shorter cables could be pulled to jumper stations to create a full length supply to a neighbouring country.

[tuwanshamoonbooso]

If we can build a supergrid connecting all countries, we can reduce the need for battery storage since when one part of the globe is in the dark, the other part in daylight we can use the solar power of countries in daylight to power the countries in dark

[dominikgadze]

The main problem is the fixation on Singapore as a buyer. They should be first flooding the Australian grid with their clean energy, the lay cables to Indonesia and sell energy to them while extending to Singapore as your final destination. They could even sell cheap. You Don't need to cover all your costs. Even a portion is better then nothing for years....
Instead of wasting money on an entire cable manufacturing plant they could literally just rolled at the speed they would've been getting on the market. Meanwhile using surplus energy to generate H2 and selling that as well to lower the costs could've been a great support for the actual goal. Why pretend those are exclusive? They could've always expanded their solar farms to match demand...