The $16 billion plan to beam Australia’s Outback sun onto Asia’s power grids
The Australia-ASEAN Power Link may be the most ambitious renewable energy project underway anywhere.
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Sydney, Australia: The Australia-ASEAN Power Link, which is part-owned by two Australian billionaires and was endorsed last month by the Australian government, may be the most ambitious renewable energy project underway anywhere.
It could mark a new chapter in the history of energy: the intercontinental movement of green power.
Australia can eventually supply cheap solar power to a pan-Asian electricity grid, lifting living standards for millions of people and reducing the region’s dependence on coal and natural gas, which are big contributors to global warming.
Scheduled to start operating in 2027 at a cost of about $16 billion, the project would combine the world’s largest solar farm, the largest battery and longest submarine electricity cable. It would produce three gigawatts of power, the equivalent of 9 million rooftop solar panels.
The specifications are so complicated that it will be designed by computers using artificial intelligence, according to David Griffin, a solar and wind farm builder.
The project, owned by a company called Sun Cable, is driven by geopolitics as much as physics. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has discussed a regional power grid for 15 years — Europeans have shared electricity for five decades — but the talks have been frustrated by political differences and infrastructure gaps.
In deep water, sea cables rest on the sea bed. As it traverses waters between Indonesia’s Lombok and Sumbawa islands less than 5,000 feet deep, the Sun Cable will have to be buried to prevent damage by anchors, according to Stephen Onley, an Australian submarine cable expert.
On land, a solar farm will be built near the remote Northern Territory town of Tennant Creek, where the average daytime temperature is 89.5 degrees Fahrenheit and a train to the regional capital, Darwin, passes through once a week.
Solar panels, covering 30,000 acres, would generate some 10 gigawatts of electricity, more than three times the amount destined for Singapore. The surplus would be consumed by storing the power during the Australian day and being transmitted transmitting it in the evenings when Singaporeans were cooking dinner and watching television, Griffin said. A small amount would be used by Darwin.
Source: Washington Post