The Australia-Asia Power Link: Record-Breaking Feats of Engineering

If you’re a fan of this channel, we’d be willing to bet that you could hold your own in a “World’s Largest” trivia contest. World’s tallest building? Easy, it’s the Burj Khalifa. World’s biggest plane? Well, until recently that was the An-225 Mriya, RIP to a real one, but these days, it’s the Stratolaunch Roc. How about the world’s largest boat? That would be the Seawise Giant, and if you’re looking for the world’s largest dam, well, that’s the Three Gorges.

But we’d be willing to bet that we could still find some questions to stump you. What’s the world’s largest solar plant? What’s the world’s largest battery? What’s the world’s longest submarine power cable? Well, if a Singaporean firm known as Sun Cable gets their way, the answer to those questions in particular will be a good bit easier than you expect—because the world’s largest solar plant, largest battery, and longest submarine power cable would all be part of their project.

Called the Australia-Asia Power Link, Sun Cable’s moonshot would use an absolutely massive solar farm in Australia’s Northern Territory, one of the sunniest places in the world, to rocket ungodly amounts of clean energy not just across the Territory, but to Singapore, and one day Indonesia as well. If it succeeds, it won’t just claim a few spots in the Guinness Book of World Records—instead, it’ll cover a major portion of Singapore’s electricity needs, and provide a valuable blueprint for many other nations to do the same.

The Vision

There’s not a lot of places in the world that are sunnier than Australia’s Northern Territory. Out of a possible 4,400-ish sunshine hours per year, this blazing-hot stretch of land gets somewhere around three thousand hours of direct sunshine each year, with the remainder usually taken up by haze or empty clouds rather than rain or lingering inclement weather. Many other regions in the world that get a similar amount of sun exposure will put it to work in their temperate climates, growing and harvesting plants for agricultural purposes, but not so in the Northern Territory, where dry, hot desert scrub is the only vegetation you’re likely to find.

This makes the Territory an ideal location for solar energy production, with vast amounts of essentially empty land, a low population, and enough pre-existing infrastructure that some massive builds could conceivably take place. Depending on how you look at it, it also stands to reason that the Northern Territory has another implicit advantage: a booming petroleum and mining industry active in the area, with not just the infrastructure, but the personnel numbers to prove that a large-scale operation there would be feasible. Of course, this is a double-edged sword—after all, it’s not as if Big Oil is known for playing nicely with clean-energy competitors, and it’s not as if they could transition their facilities and workers over to solar energy on a dime. But as a 2019 report by Beyond Zero Emissions described, the Northwest Territory could be host for clean energy production on a groundbreaking scale—and in a territory with a population of only 250,000, the eight thousand jobs Beyond Zero forecast to be created could easily become a game-changer for the population there.

Enter the Singaporean firm Sun Cable, founded in 2018 with just that same goal in mind: to develop solar energy infrastructure on Australian land, on a scale that would rival or even eclipse the Northern Territory’s fossil-fuel energy production. In Sun Cable’s estimation, a solar plant on the territory could not just handle the needs of the territory itself, including the capitol city of Darwin, but also produce enough exportable energy to meaningfully decrease fossil fuel dependencies in other nations or Australian provinces nearby.

The project that Sun Cable proposed was massive in scale: not just a solar farm, but a so-called solar precinct in the Barkly Region of the Northern Territory. With a population of just seven thousand, sprawled across some 322,000 square kilometers of land, Barkly Region is extremely sparse. Sun Cable set its sights on some twelve thousand hectares of that land, about two-thirds of the size of Washington D.C., or a little less than half the size of the city of Dublin.

For a more comprehensible measurement, it’s roughly the same surface area as 7.3 million Shaquille O’Neals all taking a nap. A particularly relevant piece, though, is that a solar farm of even this size would only take up about 0.0004% of Barkly Region, so when we talk about just how much energy this solar farm could generate, just keep in mind the scale we could be talking about if one farm in the Northern Territory led to more, and more, and then more after that.

On those 12,000 hectares, Sun Cable intends to design the Australia-Asia Power Link, or AAPowerLink, as we’ll refer to it going forward. The power plant would include numerous solar photovoltaic arrays, the slanted, dark-colored rows and rows of solar panels that make up large-scale solar farms. When all working in concert, the plant’s arrays would have a capacity to generate some ten gigawatts; that capacity estimate was upgraded in 2021, into the range of 20 gigawatts.

For context, Australia’s biggest functioning power station, the Loy Yang coal-fired power plant, produces 3.6 gigawatts. A solar plant of this size would become the world’s largest by nearly a factor of ten, blowing India’s Bhadla Solar Park out of the water. It’s enough to power three million homes—and bear in mind, the entire Northern Territory has under a hundred thousand.

Part of Sun Cable’s plan is to open a factory in Darwin to produce the photovoltaic panels used in AAPowerLink, a big potential source of new jobs in the area. But a factory is just one of several infrastructural pieces Sun Cable would need to construct in order to make the project useful, and the plans for the rest are no less ambitious. Sun Cable’s plan calls for an 800-kilometer, 3-gigawatt high-voltage power line from the plant itself to a location near Darwin, from which about 800 megawatts can be directly supplied to the Darwin region.

Also in the plan: A battery system that could store up to 42 gigawatt-hours of energy, cleanly breaking the record for the world’s largest battery storage capacity. At the solar plant itself, Sun Cable intends to construct a rail logistics yard, an accommodations camp for workers, and all the other support facilities one would expect to sustain a key infrastructural facility.

And Sun Cable’s vision goes way beyond Australia, calling for an undersea power line that would stretch 4,200 kilometers across the southern oceans. Zigzagging through the waters around the Indonesian islands, the power line would reach its end in Singapore, transferring 2.2 gigawatts direct to the small nation. That’s about a fifth of Singapore’s overall power needs, which it currently fills mostly with natural gas. It’s also five times longer than the current longest undersea power cable in the world, and would exceed the length of all undersea cables, regardless of their use.

In all, the price-tag for the project comes out to a clean thirty billion Australian dollars, about twenty billion US or seventeen billion pounds. It’s a hefty sum, but as outside evaluators began to look into the project, the investment began to seem more and more worth the cost. According to external estimates, AAPowerLink is likely to put about $8 billion Australian into the Northern Territory’s economy per year once it begins regular operations, as well as producing enough energy for Australia to earn between $1-and-2 billion per year via exports.

Ideally, the project will expand in the future and drop off some additional power to Indonesia along its journey, thus raising export potentials even more. In total, it could offset some 8.6 million tons of CO2 emissions per year.

Development and Problems

The AAPowerLink was placed onto an ambitious timetable. Sun Cable had been founded in 2018, and the project planned to secure all its necessary financing by 2023. Once that was done, it was to assume a build schedule of just five years, delivering power to Darwin by 2026 and Singapore by 2027, before hitting full capacity in 2028.

A major reason why this timetable was even technically feasible, let alone realistic, was the identity of Sun Cable’s biggest initial investors: the Australian billionaire businessmen Michael Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of the software company Atlassian, and Andrew Forrest, also known as Twiggy, leader of one of the largest iron ore producers in the world. Between the two of them, Cannon-Brookes and Forrest probably could have put down the twenty billion for Sun Cable themselves, but since that’s not how financing actually works, they instead served as early investors encouraging other rich and powerful people to come pitch in.

In 2019, AAPowerLink was designated as a major project by the government of the Northern Territory, opening the door to local supports and collaboration for the initiative. The Australian federal government signed off in 2020, and worked some bureaucratic magic in order to speed along the permit process. Also in 2020, the undersea cable route was surveyed successfully between Darwin and Singapore, and at the start of 2021, the Northern Territory entered into a commercial agreement with Sun Cable in order to better facilitate the project.

Backers began to pour money into the project, while the Northern Territory and the Australian government lauded it as a path to affordable, reliable, renewable energy in Australia by the end of the decade. Sun Cable made clear, visible efforts to pay verbal respect to Australia’s indigenous communities in the areas impacted by AAPowerLink, and though their actual handling of those community relations remains to be seen, Sun Cable’s close partnership with the Australian government suggests that those issues aren’t likely to be overlooked.

But even in the first years of the project, AAPowerLink garnered criticism for its practicality alongside praise for its vision. Some experts pointed out the difficulty in asking a nation like Singapore, or Australia for that matter, to commit to a single power source for such a large portion of the national energy infrastructure—after all, if 15% of the power supply disappears one day due to accidents, weather, or anything else, that would obviously be bad. Observers also noted international competitors, in the form of hydroelectric and solar projects from India and Malaysia, while criticizing the timeline of the project.

The Australian government, including its climate and energy leadership didn’t appear to share this same assessment. But nevertheless, the potential problems of AAPowerLink continued to loom over the project in its first several years.

This all culminated just months ago, in January 2023, when Sun Cable and the Australian government got some bad news. Despite recent funding boosts, the company was placed under voluntary administration—similar to bankruptcy—amidst an ongoing dispute between the two major power players within the company, Michael Cannon-Brookes and Andrew Forrest. Allegedly, this was due to an unwillingness by Forrest to pay directly out of pocket, to meet debt payments that Sun Cable was supposed to have gotten covered via other investors.

The missing sum, a cash infusion worth sixty million dollars, led Sun Cable to have to call in an external administrator to deal with the mess. Forrest also appears to have been advocating for a change to the overall plan for the AAPowerLink, getting rid of the undersea cable idea in favor of another alternative.

Now, we won’t be diving into the specifics on how voluntary administration works here, but suffice to say that it’s a definite setback, even if AAPowerLink isn’t technically doomed. As we write this in late February, it’s too early to report any kind of outcome on the issue, but as of now, both Cannon-Brookes and Forrest appear to be readying bids to purchase the company. As of now, the company remains under voluntary administration, and the overall cost of the project has risen by some five billion Australian dollars.

Implications for the Future

With the future of Sun Cable and the AAPowerLink up in the air, it’s difficult to see exactly how this all plays out in the near term. The project’s current obstacles include the need to work out some solution to the undersea cable issue, caused by the kilometers-deep stretches of ocean that the cable would have to cross in order to reach Singapore. Not only that, but Singapore still hasn’t committed itself as a customer to the project, so even if building were to commence as planned, there’s no guarantee that Sun Cable’s power line wouldn’t just hit a dead end.

That being said, it’s unlikely that the project is on the cusp of complete failure. Though its billionaire leaders have sharply divergent visions for the project’s next phases, both appear interested in pursuing ownership. Not only that, but the Australian government and the Northern Territory are at this point deeply invested in making the project work. If Singapore doesn’t end up coming through as a customer, Indonesia remains a potential buyer for Sun Cable’s energy, and with many critics of the project complaining that the solar plant’s energy would be exported instead of being sent southward to Australia, it’s not unthinkable that a solution might be to just use the project to start an overhaul of Australia’s own energy infrastructure.

And beyond the immediate concerns of the Sun Cable company itself, it’s important to note that the obstacles they face have long been predicted in large-scale renewable energy projects. It’s an early-adopter problem: Getting the first country or region to sign on and allow a project like this is difficult, finding a market for so much energy is difficult, battling the better-funded fossil fuel industry is difficult, and building and using this sort of technology at scale is difficult. Regardless of any issues with the project’s management, Sun Cable’s work is a pioneering effort nonetheless, and as we think about the future of these sorts of initiatives, it’s important to remember that the first solar farm of this size will be much harder to establish than the second. The second will be harder than the third, the third harder than the tenth, and so on.

With the future of Sun Cable still being written, it’s worth extrapolating out a future where a solar farm of this size does exist in Australia’s Northern Territory—that such a proof-of-concept can be shown to investors and governments around the world. AAPowerLink is projected to produce a maximum of 20 gigawatts on that 12,000-hectare space—again, a tiny percentage of the land in the sparsely populated region where it’s being planned. The nation of Singapore used 26.9 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, of which Sun Cable could supply about 20%, or 5.4 terawatt-hours.

Scale that up to Australia, which consumed 189 terawatt-hours in the 2021-22 fiscal year, and it could conceivably take as few as thirty-five solar farms the size of Sun Cable to power the entire country. And if that number seems like a lot, then bear in mind that even the land coverage of twelve thousand hectares times thirty-five would take up less than 0.1% of the land area of Barkly Region, where AAPowerLink is located. The Barkly Region, in turn, is only a small portion of the Northern Territory itself. It’s probably safe to assume that Australia has as many Not-In-My-Back-Yard folks as anybody else, but for a region that sparsely populated and given the potential to turn Australia’s entire power grid green, it’s hard to see a few local Karens being enough to stop an enthusiastic push from Australian leadership.

Would that be expensive? Absolutely. But at this time, Australia is already an exporter of energy covering 100% of its own needs, using fossil fuels that are far more expensive and far more environmentally harmful in the long run.

Add to that a likely drop in prices for solar farm equipment, via mass-production and the continued innovation that large-scale implementation would incentivize, and it’s feasible that a large-scale replication of Sun Cable’s plan could have huge ramifications for Australia. After all, even if its own energy needs were covered 100% by those thirty-five hypothetical solar plants, that still leaves 99.99% of the land area of Barkly Region available, and there’s no telling what kind of export potential that could mean.

Of course, we’re not here to make a pitch to the Australian government, but when discussing these sorts of large-scale energy projects, it’s important to extend our imagination past what’s achievable now, when even the most common renewable energy technology is still in its early stages. It’s through projects like the AAPowerLink, if it does indeed come to fruition, that scientists and engineers can push the bounds of what is currently possible—and in the process, they provide a roadmap for their achievement to be repeated more quickly and easily in the future.

With Sun Cable’s future murky at best, it’s impossible to promise that AAPowerLink will ever become reality, and even if construction does get underway, it’s even harder to guarantee that it’ll proceed on the time scale that was initially pitched. But if the Australia-Asia Power Link ever does become reality, it’ll constitute a sea change in the Pacific region’s energy infrastructure, and a highly valuable indicator of success for the many renewable energy projects yet to come.

Key Takeaways

• The Australia-Asia Power Link aims to create the world’s largest solar plant, battery, and submarine power cable.
• Sun Cable’s project in Australia’s Northern Territory could supply a significant portion of Singapore’s electricity needs.
• The solar farm would cover 12,000 hectares, generating up to 20 gigawatts, enough to power three million homes.
• The project faces financial and logistical challenges, including a dispute between major investors and technical hurdles.
• If successful, the Australia-Asia Power Link could serve as a blueprint for large-scale renewable energy projects globally.

Sources

• Original MegaProjects video: The Australia-Asia Power Link: Record-Breaking Feats of Engineering
• http://www.darwin.climatemps.com/sunlight.php
• https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jun/20/clean-energy-found-to-be-a-pathway-to-prosperity-for-northern-territory
• https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/01/28/major-milestone-for-worlds-biggest-solar-project/
• https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/australia-to-fast-track-worlds-largest-solar-battery-project-with-grid-link-to-singapore/2-1-849688
• https://suncable.energy/
• https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/12/billionaire-biffo-shines-light-on-hugely-ambitious-30bn-solar-project
• https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/australia-to-asia-power-project-will-go-up-sale-january-2023-01-20/
• https://www.infrastructureaustralia.gov.au/projects/australia-asia-powerlink
• https://ntepa.nt.gov.au/your-business/public-registers/environmental-impact-assessments-register/assessments-in-progress-register/australia-asia-powerlink-project
• https://www.power-technology.com/projects/australia-asia-powerlink-australia-singapore/
• https://www.pv-tech.org/australia-asia-powerlink-developer-sun-cable-goes-into-administration/
• https://www.envirosc.com/insight/australia-asia-power-link-the-worlds-most-ambitious-renewable-energy-project/
• https://gateway.icn.org.au/project/4536/australia-asia-powerlink
• https://www.pwc.com.au/integrated-infrastructure-building-australia/project-experience-sun-cable-australia-asia-power-link.html
• https://www.aseanbriefing.com/news/the-australia-asian-powerlink-encouraging-investments-in-asean-renewable-energy/
• https://worldsteel.org/steel-stories/infrastructure/australia-asia-powerlink-solar-worlds-longest-underwater-cable/
• https://www.energymagazine.com.au/from-the-northern-territory-to-singapore-the-australia-asia-powerlink/
• https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/how-to-attract-more-early-adopters-and-jumpstart-massmarket-adoption-of-renewable-energy/#gref
• Hero image source by Poppy Parkes-Old / openverse, by-sa.

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