“The world’s largest renewable energy and transmission project has received key approval from government officials,” reports New Atlas.
Solar power from Australia will be carried 2,672 miles (4,300 kilometers) to Singapore over undersea cables in what’s being called “the Australia-Asia Power Link project.” Reuters reports that SunCable “aims to produce 6 gigawatts of electricity at a vast solar farm in Northern Australia and ship about a third of that to Singapore via undersea cable.”
More from New Atlas:
[The project] will start by constructing a mammoth solar farm in Australia’s Northern Territory to transmit around-the-clock clean power to [the Australian city] Darwin, and also export “reliable, cost-competitive renewable energy” to Singapore… with a clean energy generation capacity of up to 10 gigawatts, plus utility scale onsite storage. [The recently-obtained environmental approval] also green lights an 800-km (~500-mile) overhead transmission line between the solar precinct and Murrumujuk near Darwin…
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 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.
Abstract credit: https://m.slashdot.org/story/434727
This is one of the cases where I’d just argue for nuclear energy. Too many industries and too high population density makes it very hard to use solar energy properly, they don’t have a lot of land either so land redistribution probably wouldn’t work as an alternative measure.
Do the economics of nuclear make sense though? A quick search showed around $5k/kW capacity. That’s $5 billion per GW. Then there’s permit and build times on top of that.
Surely renewables + distributed storage is going to become key?