Sun Cable‘s Australia-ASEAN project is the world’s most ambitious renewable energy project yet proposed. It combines the world’s largest solar farm, the most extended undersea electricity cable, and the largest battery. It will cost about $16 billion but already has investors, including billionaires Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest and Mike Cannon-Brookes.
The solar farm will cover 30,000 acres and deliver 10 gigawatts (GWs) of power – the equivalent of nine million rooftops of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels. It will be located in Australia’s sunny Northern Territory. The solar farm will deliver round-the-clock dispatch of clean power thanks to a 30 gigawatt-hour (GWh) battery storage facility on-site. That’s 155 times more energy storage capacity than the world’s largest lithium-ion battery currently in operation – Australia’s 193.5 megawatt-hours (MWh) Hornsdale Power Reserve.
Since the solar farm is located in the middle of nowhere, the project will require cables to get the power out. The plan is for an 800-kilometer high-voltage overhead power line to transmit 3 GW to Darwin on the northern coast, then a transfer to a 3,700 km 2.2 GW undersea power line that will deliver electricity to Singapore. To put the length into perspective, this project’s undersea power line is five times longer than the most extended undersea cable in the world – the 720 km Norway-to-Britain North Sea Link.
More often than not, the planet’s best renewable energy resources are not found near population centers. The ASEAN project is placed where it is because of how sunny it is there. Similarly, the best wind resources in the US are found throughout the sparsely populated central Midwest. Therefore, the large-scale deployment of renewable electricity generation will require longer transmission lines to relieve regional constraints. This can be costly, posing a significant challenge to decarbonization.
Nevertheless, Sun Cable is already on the path to approval, and as expensive as the project is, the calculations show the project will profit over its lifetime. The company expects construction to begin in 2023, connect to the grid by 2026, and export to Singapore by 2027. Two-thirds of the energy generated will be exported, providing the island nation with 20% of its electricity needs.
