Source: Sun Cable

The details of the project designed to provide 15 percent of Singapore’s electricity needs were disclosed in a potential environmental impact report submitted to the Northern Territory industry regulator in late April: a 17-20 GW solar farm integrated with a 36 to 42 GWh battery will be commissioned in this Australian state.

The 12,000-hectare complex of solar panels and storage batteries is to be located in Barkley County, part of the Northern Territory. The power will be transmitted over an 800-kilometre-long transmission line with 6.4 GW capacity to the converter site in the Indian Ocean town of Murrumujuk, near Darwin: 0.8 GW will be supplied from that place to Australian customers, with the remaining 5.6 GW to be transmitted to Singapore over six 4,200-kilometre-long submarine cable systems. The complex is designed for a 70-year operation, during which the total of 480 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions will be saved, comparable to South Africa’s annual emissions (513.4 million tons, according to the World Bank).

The Sun Cable expects to complete the project fund raising in 2023, and to begin construction of generating facilities in 2024. The commissioning of the complex will make possible implementation of the ideas of intercontinental power transmission, which have gained popularity with the development of ultra-high voltage (UHV) technologies, one of the pioneers of which was Japan. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) built two 1000 kV UHV lines in 1999, one line connected a nuclear plant in northern Japan with the metropolitan area in the south, and the other linked the Pacific coast power plants.

Having completed the construction of the 1100 kV Changji-Guquan line in 2018, China implemented a major UHV project. “Stretching for 3,324 km, it can transmit 100 million kWh of electricity every 8 hours and 20 minutes, thereby contributing to the solution of the problem of imbalance between the energy-surplus West and the energy-deficient East of China,” Jin Liang He, one of the co-authors of the second report “10 Breakthrough Ideas in Energy for the Next 10 Years,” told the Global Energy last year. In his opinion, UHV technology will expand the geography of the renewable energy use: “Renewable energy producing countries will be able to export it to the regions where alternative power industry has not become widespread, in part because of the differences in natural conditions”.