If a group of Australian investors are right their plan for to build and transmit electricity from the north of the country could have far-reaching consequences for Australia’s energy industry and what the country sells to the world.
Known as Sun Cable, and located in the desert outside Tennant Creek, deep in the Northern Territory, it is promised to be the world’s largest solar farm.
If developed as planned, a 10-gigawatt (GW) array of panels will be spread across 15,000 hectares and be backed by battery storage to ensure it can supply power around the clock.
Overhead transmission lines will send electricity to Darwin and plug into the NT grid.
However, more importantly, the bulk would be exported via a high-voltage direct-current submarine cable snaking through the Indonesian archipelago to Singapore.
The Guardian Online reports the developers say it will be able to provide one-fifth of the island city-state’s electricity needs, replacing its increasingly expensive gas-fired power.
After 18 months in development, the $20 billion Sun Cable development had a quiet coming out party three weeks ago at a series of events held to highlight the NT’s solar potential.
The Guardian Online reports the NT Labor government has embraced the idea and attracted the attention of the software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes, who is considering involvement through his Grok Ventures private investment firm.
The NT plan follows a similarly ambitious proposal for the Pilbara, where another group of developers are working on an even bigger wind and solar hybrid plant to power local industry and develop a green hydrogen manufacturing hub.
On Friday, project developer Andrew Dickson announced the scale of the proposed Asian Renewable Energy Hub had grown by more than a third, from 11GW to 15GW.
“To our knowledge, it’s the largest wind-solar hybrid in the world,” he said.
The Guardian Online reports these developments are still at relatively early stages of planning, and both teams say it will be four years before they lock in finance, with production scheduled to start mid-to-late next decade.
However, renewable energy watchers are cautiously optimistic they could help spark a new way of thinking about Australia’s energy exports, one that better aligns with the country’s commitment to the United Nations sponsored Paris Agreement on climate change, rather than broadening a fossil fuel trade at odds with it.
Opponents to Australia taking significant action on the climate crisis often point out the country is responsible for about 1.4 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, placing it about 15th on a table of carbon-polluting nations.
A recent report by science and policy institute Climate Analytics makes the case that this underplays Australia’s contribution, which increases by five per cent if fossil fuel exports are included.
The latter figure is expected to increase over the next decade.
Australia is the world’s biggest exporter of coal and rivals Qatar as the leader in selling Liquified Natural Gas (LNG).
There is bipartisan support for a significant expansion of both industries, though government economists anticipate export earnings from coal will fall.
Ross Garnaut, former advisor to Labor governments who is now professor of economics at the University of Melbourne and chairman of the Australian-German Energy Transition Hub, makes the case that there is another way ahead.
In a recent lecture series that is being turned into a book, he lays out his analysis of how Australia, with the best renewable energy resource in the developed world, could expand its energy production while significantly reducing global emissions.
The Guardian Online reports Sun Cable’s chief executive, David Griffin, is bullish about the possibility of his company helping power Singapore from the outback in less than a decade.
He says the project will use prefabricated solar cells to capture “one of the best solar radiance reserves on the planet”.
However, he said the major transformation that made the farm possible was the advent of a high-voltage, direct current submarine cable, which he described as the “greatest unsung technology development”.
Sun Cable’s underwater link to Singapore will run 3800km.
“It is extraordinary technology that is going to change the flow of energy between countries.
It is going to have profound implications and the extent of those implications hasn’t been widely identified,” Mr Griffin said.
Sun Cable’s backers believe Singapore, as a well-regulated electricity market that runs mostly on gas piped from Malaysia and Indonesia and shipped as LNG, is ripe for competition.
Across in the Pilbara, the Asian Renewable Energy Hub proposal has taken another tack.
The developers, a consortium of InterContinental Energy, CWP Energy Asia, wind energy company Vestas and financiers at the Macquarie Group, began with a plan to send energy to Indonesia via sub-sea cable.
That has been dropped in favour of green hydrogen, a shift driven, Mr Dickson said, by falling costs and growing international and local interest that suggests a much bigger market.
The Guardian Online reports an expanded hub proposal released this week said it would be spread across a vast area, 6500sq/km, or about half the size of greater Sydney, and create 3000 construction and 400 operational jobs. About two-thirds of the 15GW capacity will be met with giant wind turbines and one-third solar panels.
The developers say up to a fifth of the total capacity is expected to go to large industrial energy users in the Pilbara, potentially including new and expanded mines and mineral processing.
However, most of the electricity generated will be used to run a hydrogen manufacturing hub.
The hydrogen would be sold domestically and exported, most likely to Japan and South Korea, which have expressed a desire to shift energy consumption in that direction.
Mr Dickson said producing green hydrogen at large volumes could open up possibilities such as using it to replace coking coal in steel production.
Mr Griffin and Mr Dickson both decline to comment on the role the conservative Liberal-National federal government could or should play in developing green exports, although they volunteer that some local MPs and state governments are supportive.
Both note the fact their proposals are off-grid has helped insulate them from politically loaded debates that pit renewable energy against fossil fuels.
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