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TThe desert outside Tennant Creek in the Northern Territories is not the most obvious place to build and transport Singapore's electricity supply. Although few Southern states have yet realized, a group of Australian developers bet that it will change.
If they are right, it could have serious consequences for the Australian energy sector and what the country sells to the world.
Known as Sun Cable, it is promised to be the largest solar park in the world. If the system is developed as planned, a panel of 10 gigawatts of capacity will be spread over 15,000 hectares and will have a storage battery to ensure 24-hour power supply.
The overhead lines will carry electricity to Darwin and connect to the NT network. But the essential would be exported via a high-voltage, DC submarine cable running through the Indonesian archipelago up to Singapore. The proponents said it would be able to provide one-fifth of the island city-state's electricity needs, replacing its increasingly expensive gas-fired power.
After 18 months of development, Sun Cable's $ 20 billion development has hosted a Top End party three weeks ago in a series of events to showcase the potential solar NT. The idea was adopted by the NT government and drew the attention of the billionaire software Mike Cannon-Brookes, which plans to participate through its private investment company Grok Ventures.
NT's plan follows a similar ambitious proposal for Pilbara, where another group of developers is working on an even larger hybrid wind and solar power plant to power the local industry and develop a manufacturing center. green hydrogen. On Friday, project developer Andrew Dickson announced that the scale of the proposed Asian renewable energy center had increased by more than a third, from 11 GW to 15 GW. "To our knowledge, this is the largest wind-solar hybrid in the world," he says.
The horizon line of Singapore. Sun Cable's plan could replace one-fifth of the city's electricity needs, currently covered by expensive gas production. Photography: Edgar Su / Reuters
These developments are still at a relatively early stage of planning. Both teams said it would only take them four years to get into the finances and that production should start between the middle and the end of the next decade. But renewable energy observers are cautiously optimistic in contributing to a new way of thinking about Australia's energy exports – an approach more in line with the country's commitment to the Paris agreement on the climate, instead of expanding a fossil fuel trade in contradiction with it.
Opponents of Australia who take significant action against the climate crisis often point out that the country is responsible for about 1.4% of greenhouse gas emissions, putting it in fifteenth place among the nations that pollute carbon. According to a recent report from the scientific and policy institute Climate Analytics, this underestimates the contribution of Australia, which increases by 5% if fossil fuel exports are included.
This last figure is expected to increase over the next decade. Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal and Qatar, the leader in the sale of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in Qatar. Bipartite support is in favor of a significant expansion of both industries, although government economists predict a decline in coal export earnings.
Ross Garnaut, former adviser to the Labor governments, now professor of economics at the University of Melbourne and president of the German-Australian Energy Transition Center, says there is another way forward. In a series of conferences recently turned into a book, he presents his badysis of how Australia, with the best source of renewable energy in developed countries, could increase its energy production while significantly reducing global emissions .
Garnaut points to the transformative reduction in the capital cost of renewables and energy storage over the past two decades. Since the cost of clean energy developments is essentially capital (fuel is free), he explained that the transformation had dramatically changed the ability of projects to compete with fossil fuels. According to Garnaut, capital costs are lower in developed countries, which means that Australia can, if managed properly, be the center of low-cost energy in a future carbon-free world.
This would be the natural focus of growth in mineral processing for a world that increasingly values solar-powered production, wind and other clean sources. Industries that can flourish under Garnaut's vision include traditional energy-intensive operations such as aluminum, iron ore, and steel, as well as new opportunities in the areas of silica, lithium, vanadium, nickel, cobalt and copper.
"This will be the channel through which energy production in Australia will significantly reduce emissions in the rest of the world. It will also be the foundation of a new era of economic expansion and prosperity, "he said.
Garnaut think that exporting electricity via high voltage cables and green hydrogen will be part of that clean energy future, even if one would expect that. They arrive later. Sun Cable chief executive David Griffin is optimistic that his company is helping Singapore propel Singapore out of the market in less than a decade.
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According to him, the project will use prefabricated solar cells to capture "one of the best solar radiation reserves on the planet". But he says that the major transformation that makes the farm possible is the advent of the submarine high-voltage cable and DC, which he describes as the "biggest unknown technological development". The Sun Cable underwater link to Singapore will extend over 3,800 km.
"It is an extraordinary technology that will change the flow of energy between countries. This will have profound implications and the magnitude of these implications has not been widely identified, "Griffin said.
"If you carry electricity over very large distances between countries, the flow of energy goes from liquid fuels – oil and LNG – to electrons. In the end, it's a much more efficient way to transport energy. The licensees will simply not be able to participate. "
Supporters of Sun Cable believe that Singapore, as a well-regulated electricity market, operating primarily with gas from Malaysia and Indonesia and shipped as LNG, is ready to compete.
In the Pilbara, the proposal of the Asia Renewable Energy Center in Asia has taken another angle. The developers – a consortium of InterContinental Energy, CWP Energy Asia, the wind energy company Vestas and Macquarie Group financiers – began with a plan to send energy to Indonesia via a underwater cable. This has been abandoned in favor of green hydrogen – a shift driven by falling costs and growing interest at the international and local levels, suggesting Andrew Dickson, who suggests a much larger market.
An expanded hub proposal released this week indicates that it will expand over a large area – 6,500 km2, about half of the area of Greater Sydney – and will create 3,000 construction jobs and 400 operational jobs. . About two thirds of the capacity of 15 GW will be equipped with giant wind turbines and a third of solar panels. According to the developers, up to one fifth of the total capacity should be aimed at large industrial users of energy in the Pilbara, including potentially new mines and expanded mines and mineral processing. But most of the electricity generated will be used to run a hydrogen manufacturing center.
The hydrogen would be sold domestically and exported, probably to Japan and South Korea, who expressed the wish to move energy consumption in that direction. Dickson says that producing green hydrogen in large quantities could offer opportunities such as its use to replace coking coal in steel production. This could enable an expanded version of the "green steel" model adopted at Whyalla by British industrialist Sanjeev Gupta.
Dickson cites recent badessments by Australian scientist Alan Finkel and the International Energy Agency as proof of the potential of hydrogen. "After several decades of promises, people realize that the time may have come for it to be a thing," he says.
Griffin and Dickson both refuse to comment on the role that the federal government could or should play in the development of green exports, although they argue that some local and state governments support it. Both note that the fact that their proposals are off-grid has helped them protect themselves from the politically charged debates between renewable energies and fossil fuels.
Roger Dargaville, Renewable Energy Lecturer at Monash University and member of the Energy Transition Hub, points to the amount of work being done to examine the future of clean export. A recent project in which he participated suggests a 40 gigawatt undersea power cable in Indonesia, much larger than the one originally proposed by the Asian Center for Renewable Energy, would be viable by 2035 if that country adopted an emission reduction target.
Dargaville believes that future exports will almost certainly consist of a mixture of hydrogen, wired electricity and refined minerals before shipment. He added that no one should underestimate the scale of what would be needed to replace the existing fossil fuel industries in Australia (the coal and LNG industries are worth more than $ 100 billion a year and employ tens of thousands of people) and that the political and technological challenges will be considerable. But he points out that nobody should be mistaken in international markets.
The only question that arises is whether this is within the timeline indicated by climatologists. "It's not really yes or no, it's just when."
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