The solar park will be located in Barkley County, part of the Northern Territory (an Australian region). The electricity generated will be transported via an 800-kilometer transmission line to the Murrumujuk settlement located on the Indian Ocean coast. From here, DC power will feed a 4,300-kilometer cable that will transit Indonesian territorial waters to Singapore. The DC power will be converted to AC power when fed into Singapore’s power grid.
The project will increase renewable energy (RES) availability in Singapore, where there is a shortage of space for solar generators. According to Ember, photovoltaic panels accounted for only 1.6% of Singapore’s electricity generation in 2023, while gas-fired power plants – for 92.6%, with biomass plants and oil-fired thermal power plants providing another 5.8%. Despite the stable population, electricity consumption in Singapore has grown by almost 20% over the last ten years (from 48 to 57 TWh) also due to the spread of electric cars. Thus, the share of electric cars in sales of all types of cars rose from 11.7% in the first half of 2022 to 32.4% in the first half of 2024.
Projects to transport electricity over long distances are widespread in China, where ultra-high voltage lines are used for this purpose. For example, Jiangsu Province in the east of the country receives electricity through two UHV lines: the first, a 1,100 kV line, which is 3,324 km long. was commissioned in 2018 for supplies from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region; the second, a 800 kV line, which is 2,080 km long, allows receiving electricity from Sichuan Province since 2022. Both regions are among the leaders in terms of RES development: Sichuan is home to the Baihatan 16 GW hydropower plant, the second largest hydropower plant in the world, and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has the largest solar park on the planet (Midong with a capacity of 3.5 GW).
