Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO of Atlassian, has received approval from the Singaporean government for his plan to transport electricity from Australia to Singapore. We are about to witness something truly incredible in renewable energy.
The project, known as Australia-Asia Power Link (AAPowerLink), aims to create a 12,000-hectare solar park in a remote area of the Northern Territory, Australia.
This installation will be capable of generating up to six gigawatts of electricity, and the accompanying batteries will allow the juice to flow 24/7. An 800 km cable will connect the solar park to the city of Darwin, with a population of approximately 140,000, which will consume around 4 GW of the energy produced.
The energy will flow through an underwater cable of over 4,000 km
A large portion of the remaining energy will be transmitted through a 4,300 km undersea cable connecting Darwin to Singapore. The island nation will rely on the project for over ten percent of its energy consumption.
Cannon-Brookes’ personal investment vehicle, Grok Ventures, owns SunCable, the company developing AAPowerLink.
SunCable welcomed the government approval, and the government celebrated the project. The Minister for the Environment and Water, Tanya Plibersek, hailed the project as the world’s largest solar park and Australia’s largest renewable energy project.
The scale of the solar park is daunting, but not insurmountable. The 800 km transmission line to Darwin is also not intimidating, as it will share a railway corridor and therefore be accessible. It is also not very long, so to speak.
However, the submarine component has its critics, including Australian entrepreneur Bevan Slattery, who has extensive experience in building undersea data cables.
Slattery argued that the Darwin-Singapore route traverses some of the most dangerous waters in the world due to high levels of tectonic and volcanic activity. He is also concerned about the intense maritime traffic that passes near the proposed route, and points out that there have been over 70 cable repairs within just 70 km of Singapore.
Transmission loss is another issue. Out of the over 4,000 km of cable, Slattery estimates that there will be a significant energy loss, so according to him, solar parks closer to Singapore would be more profitable.
Another critic is Cannon-Brookes’ former business partner, mining billionaire Andrew Forrest, who prefers to use giant solar parks to produce hydrogen for export and hydrogen-powered electricity generators.
Now all they have to do is fund it, build it, and prove their critics wrong. All while leading Atlassian on their own after the departure of co-founder Scott Farquhar.
