Plan to cable Australian sunshine to Singapore gets green light

The world's largest renewable energy and transmission project has received key approval from government officials. The Australia-Asia Power Link project will send Australian solar power to Singapore via 4,300 kilometer-long undersea cables.

The AAPowerLink project is being led by SunCable, and will start by constructing a mammoth solar farm in Australia's Northern Territory to transmit around-the-clock clean power to Darwin, and also export "reliable, cost-competitive renewable energy" to Singapore.

The principal environmental approval recently obtained from the Northern Territory Government rubber stamps the building of a solar farm at Powell Creek with a clean energy generation capacity of up to 10 gigawatts, plus utility scale onsite storage. It also green lights an 800-km (~500-mile) overhead transmission line between the solar precinct and Murrumujuk near Darwin.

A converter facility will convert electricity from high-voltage direct current to high-voltage alternating current to supply Darwin – with the setup expected to supply "up to 4GW of 24/7 green electricity to green industrial customers." This will be rolled out over two stages, the first delivering 900 megawatts, and then second adding a further 3 gigawatts.

The project also aims to convert another 1.75 GW of power from AC to DC and send it through 4,300 km (over 2,670 miles) of subsea cabling to Singapore. The environmental approval will allow the company to lay cable from Darwin converter station past the end of Australian territorial waters and up to the Indonesian border.

The company, which was acquired by billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes last year after a bidding war with former project partner Andrew Forrest, still has a number of large hurdles to jump over before the AAPowerLink project really gets going though. These include negotiating land use with traditional owners, nailing down agreements with other bodies along the route and even actually financing the ambitious project.

"SunCable is delighted to receive environmental approval from the Northern Territory Government to proceed with our flagship Australia-Asia Power Link project," said company MD, Cameron Garnsworthy. "This approval allows us to progress the development, commercial, and engineering activities required to advance the project to Final Investment Decision targeted in 2027."

If all of the dominoes line up perfectly, supply of the first clean electricity is estimated to start in the early 2030s. An overview graphic on the project page (reproduced above) shows that the eventual end game for the Powell Creek development appears to be the generation of up to 20 GW of peak solar power and have some 36-42 GWh of battery storage on site. The video below has more.

Source: SunCable