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Comment by thejarren | Hacker News Reader

Just to add to this conversation a bit, did you know Singapore is running power wires to gather solar from Australia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

Remarkably, this was being planned even while Australia had an anti renewable energy government, which was more interested in promoting the coal industry. Yet as the maps make clear, Australia with its climate, location, and low population density, is potentially a solar energy superpower.

Australia and its policy on coal mines and such seems like a bizarre version of USA Republicans. It's like English-colonialism Texas.

Yes, although with our recent election result, it looks like the tide may finally have turned. The pro coal government really sucked. They went from "we support renewables in theory but the economic case isn't there" to "we will do anything possible to continue to burn coal, including buying uneconomic coal power stations whose owners don't want to run them anymore'.

I never understood the laziness of the coal lobby, why would they not want to own the next new energy source en mass. They could have blanketed the hunter and all of FNQLD with arrays and just printed money. Such a classic stuffy old white man style way of trying to bend the world to their way of thinking. Though it did work for a while, I must admit.

You should visit, it's weirdly close to that, with pretty brutal anti-drug laws and horrible Internet to boot... but super high minimum wages? Not to mention how they treated their people native to the land... somehow rivals what the English/Americans did to the Native Americans, if you can believe it.

It's bizarro land. It's pleasant enough, but it's not hard to see how Americans and Australians are related.

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The AAPowerLink is being developed by the Singaporean firm Sun Cable and is projected to begin construction in mid-2023

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Being developed

I think it has a good chance of happening with Mike-cannon Brookes and Andrew Forrest pushing it along. I hope it's better protected than the internet subsea cables, those things get cut about once per year.

Cut internet cables is just a matter of statistics, there are simply a lot of these cables so a even individually rare events happen relatively often. Submarine fibre cables already carry significant electrical power for the amplifiers and are well armored, I doubt that elictricity cables would be much better. The issue is typically ships ignoring no-anchor areas, that's also why most of these cuts happen in more unregulated regions.

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