A colossal US$22-billion infrastructure project will send Australian sunshine more than 3,100 miles (5,000 km) to Singapore, via high-voltage undersea cables. Opening in 2027, it''ll be the largest solar farm and battery storage facility in history.
Australia''s Northern Territory has abundant space and sun; Singapore is pressed for space, and looking to transition to renewable power. The two could soon be connected in one of the largest and most ambitious renewable energy projects ever attempted.
The Australia-Asia PowerLink project, led by Australia''s Sun Cable, plans to create a mammoth "Powell Creek Solar Precinct" on 12,000 hectares (29650 ac) of arid land about 800 km (500 miles) south of Darwin. The site, chosen because it''s one of the most consistently sunny places on Earth, would be home to a mind-boggling 17-20 gigawatts of peak solar power generation and some 36-42 GWh of battery storage.
To give you a sense of scale, that''s nearly 10 times the size of the world''s current largest solar power installation, the 2.245-GW Bhadia Solar Park in India, and more than 30 times more energy storage than the last "world''s biggest battery" project we covered in February. It''s a bit big.
Power will travel north to the coast through overhead cables, and then it''ll travel northwest to Singapore via some 4,200 km (2,600 miles) of high-voltage DC submarine cable along the sea floor, making a dog-leg through some of the fiddly islands of Indonesia. It''ll supply up to 3.2 GW of dispatchable clean energy, which Sun Cable says will provide up to 15 percent of Singapore''s electricity and power up to three million homes.
The environmental benefits will be significant, cutting about 11.5 million tons of CO2 emissions, which the company says is the equivalent of removing 2.5 million cars from the road.
The Australia-Asia PowerLink project has been granted Major Project status by the Australian and Northern Territory governments. The company has completed a Series A capital raise to get things going, and has completed the sub-sea survey process in the 750 km (466 miles) of the route that falls in Australian waters. Indonesia is on board, having recommended the cable route and approved a survey permit.
Environmental studies are underway, capital raising is set to close in 2023 and construction is set to begin shortly afterward. The plan is for power to start selling in Darwin by the start of 2026, and for Singapore to come online at the start of 2027.
The world''s most ambitious renewable energy project to date is the proposed Australia–ASEAN Power Link. This project would combine the world''s largest solar farm, the largest battery, and longest undersea electricity cable. The 10 gigawatt (GW) solar farm would cover 30,000 acres in Australia''s sunny Northern Territory. That is about the equivalent of 9 million rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) panels. The solar farm would be paired with a 30 gigawatt-hour (GWh) battery storage facility to enable round-the-clock dispatch of renewable power.
It''s not enough to build a solar far in the middle of nowhere if you can''t get the power out. The project currently envisions an 800 kilometer high-voltage overhead power line to transmit 3 GW to Darwin on the northern coast of Australia''s Northern Territory. From there, it would transfer to a 3,700 km 2.2 GW undersea power line to Singapore. Sun Cable, a Singapore-based company founded in 2018, is behind the proposed $16 billion project.
For perspective, this undersea line would be five times longer than the world''s longest so long — the 720 km Norway-to-Britain North Sea Link that is scheduled to be online in 2021. The storage facility would be 155 times larger than Australia''s 193.5 megawatt-hour (MWh) Hornsdale Power Reserve, currently the world''s largest operational lithium-ion battery. And it would also be 100 times larger than the world''s largest utility-scale battery, the 300 MWh sodium-sulfur battery at Japan''s Buzen Substation.
The Australia-ASEAN project is scheduled to come online by the end of 2027. The project''s developers expect it to create up to 1,500 jobs during the construction phase, and up to 350 jobs during operations. Given the interest in these types of projects, it is important to understand the challenges and ultimate cost of transporting renewable energy over long distances. The ability to do this economically has important ramifications from the Sahara Desert to the American Midwest to the Arctic.
Indeed, the world has tremendous renewable energy resources, but often those resources are found far from population centers. For example, the best wind resources in the U.S. can be found in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, as well as throughout the sparsely populated central Midwest. Likewise, many of the world''s best solar resources can be found in sparsely populated desert regions.
The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)has statedthat large-scale deployment of renewable electricity generation will require additional transmission lines to relieve regional constraints.
In fact, there has been tremendous interest in linking up some of these rich renewable resources with population centers via transmission lines, but the costs are often prohibitive. These infrastructure projects are generally multibillion-dollar projects that must also win over approval from regulators and landowners.
To be clear, the challenges will be significant. There are always risks when building the largest of anything, and this project envisions doing that in three separate categories. That substantially increases the risks of failure. Many challenges will need to be overcome.
For example, subsea cables typically traverse shallow water. In this case, the cable will need to navigate deep trenches. That, combined with the length that needs to be traversed, will provide unprecedented challenges for the ships that will attempt to lay the cable. This is just a single example of the kinds of challenges such megaprojects can face.
To estimate the cost of the solar power produced by this system, we must make a few assumptions. The first is on the lifetime of the system. A general rule of thumb is that solar PV systems will last about 25 years. These systems can still produce power beyond that time frame, but significant degradation in the power output will occur by then.
For example, if the 10 GW system could run at full output 24 hours a day, it could generate 24 x 365 x 10 = 87,600 GWh per year. Across Australia the average capacity factor for large-scale PV systems is estimated at 21%. Given the scale and location of the Sun Cable project, it''s not unreasonable to assume they could reach the upper range of 25% capacity factor.
But there are line losses to consider. Although direct current is a more efficient means of transmitting power over long distances than alternating current, some of the power transmitted is lost as heat. For DC, those line losses are dependent on the voltage of the line and the distance over which the power is transmitted. Most HVDC lines use voltages between 100 kilovolts (kV) and 800 kV. Given the power and distance traveled, the Australia-ASEAN Power Link will probably be on the upper end of that scale.
Siemenshas stated that for 2.5 GW of power transmitted on 800 km of overhead line, the line loss at 800 kV HVDC is just 2.6%. Extrapolating that to the full length of the 4,500 km line would imply an overall power loss of 14.6% (assuming the losses in the undersea HVDC are comparable to those of the overhead line).
Thus, the overall delivered power could be estimated at 547.5 TWh * 85.4% = 467.6 TWh. Then the simple levelized cost of the power produced from this project would be $16 billion divided by 467.6 TWh (which is equivalent to 467.6 billion kilowatt hours), or $0.034/kWh.
That is an attractive price, but it only provides a simple, low-end estimate of the capital cost contribution to the project. This would need to be added to the ongoing maintenance costs – some of which could be significant if the undersea cable requires repairs – and financing costs. Available solar subsidies, which have also not been considered, could partially defray these costs.
The AUD$20 billion facility – the heart of an ambitious electricity network called the Australia–ASEAN Power Link – will be built at a remote cattle station in the Northern Territory, roughly halfway between Darwin and Alice Springs.
The gargantuan 10-gigawatt array – spread out across some 20,000 football fields'' worth of photovoltaic panels – might be situated close to the heart of the Australian outback, but the energy reaped from the plant will ultimately be transported far, far away from the sunburnt country.
That''s because the Power Link doesn''t just involve building the world''s largest solar farm, which will be easily visible from space. The project also anticipates construction of what will be the world''s longest submarine power cable, which will export electricity all the way from outback Australia to Singapore via a 4,500-kilometre (2,800 miles) high-voltage direct current (HVDC) network.
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