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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Singapore is always going to be vulnerable to energy supplies, adding another suppliers reduces risks overall, even if each supply has its own individual risks.

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.

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.

Singapore is also building a floating solar farm near the Raffles light house in the seas to the south of Singapore. And under neath it, also tidal turbines

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.

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.

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.

The guy who made the script is perfect.

I think I've read somewhere that the cable that supposed to connect the UK with Morocco would need more than the steel produced each year. That problem is bigger than red tape or trust issues

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.

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

At present time, it is a worthwhile idea to transport this energy. But consider the availability of sunlight and wind are very widespread across the globe delivered freely by nature. So, the idea of having huge interconnection like this may become moot in the near future because most of the world's population lives in the sunny & warm locations. Transporting this energy possibly could have value for remote locations living in high latitudes perhaps but that's it. Moreover, the idea of energy independence is growing since energy is a matter of national security level importance. It's just that the level of energy independence that renewables can provide has been unthinkable in past decades with fossil fuel global dominance -- exactly what the fossil fuel hegemony wanted. Renewables have reached historic level low costs of energy production and still continue to fall in price! The raw inputs of sunlight & wind cannot be sanctioned, blockaded, tariffed or taxed.

In an era of growing geopolitical tensions I see no prospect of this happening in the foreseeable future.

Turning the power to methane or ammonia seems more viable. It can be easily stored, which reduces the concerns about energy security, just as how we use natural gas these days. It can be transferred without massively building a mega power cable network.

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