Eventually, the project’s backers believe that Australia eventually can 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.
“The cool new thing is to seriously talk about moving renewable energy around long-term as the carbon-free alternative to the existing fossil fuel trade,” said Peter Cowling, chief executive of Vestas Australia, a wind farm builder. “This is the most plausible solution I have seen to helping Asia decarbonize its energy supply.”
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 who said he came up with the idea while driving through Australia’s hot, dry interior.
“Millions of calculations are needed,” he said. “No one has combined those technologies into a single project of this nature before. It is beyond a human’s ability to design it.”
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.
With no natural sources of energy, cloudy skies 80 percent of the time and two much bigger neighbors — Malaysia and Indonesia — long envious of its wealth and social stability, Singapore is looking for reliable, cheap energy that does not contribute to global warming.
Safe, peaceful and sunny Australia could be the solution. Separating the two countries, though, are thousands of miles of ocean, the Indonesian archipelago and the 10,000-foot-deep Sunda Trench.
The longest submarine power cable under construction is the 435-mile Norway-to-Britain North Sea Link, which is scheduled to start operating next year, according to Griffin.
Sun Cable would be six times as long. The sea floor along the route will have to be mapped in precise detail by sonar. Over the total distance, some 4 to 10 percent of the electricity would be naturally lost along its speed-of-light journey, depending on the design of the cable, engineers say.
