Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore
pv-tech.org
pv-tech.org
The longest submarine power cable in the world - the Viking Link - is a mere 756 km long and cost US$2.2bn to build. Sun Cable calls for a 4,200km submarine cable to be built!
I do not expect the construction cost to scale linearly and I shudder to imagine the maintenance difficulties and expenses.
Back in December 2015, Australia's 290km long undersea Basslink cable broke causing the 2016 Tasmanian energy crisis. It took 6 months to get it working again. Basslink eventually went into receivership on 12 November 2021.
Something to ponder.
In addition, the boats that service these cables are mostly in the northern hemisphere, where most of the undersea cables exist. So there was a ~5 month wait on the repair. I'd expect a 4000Km cable to have it's own fleet of boats for servicing.
I can understand that the combined probability of breakage along the line could be a maintenance problem but the construction cost should have many amortizable components that deliver some sort of economics of scale.
I haven’t done the math so I have no idea on actual viability or if it’s a good idea or not.
Don't know the details of this project but if the cable is subsidized by the government it doesn't matter if it scales super or sublinearly, taxpayers are on the hook.
a) Politicians are typically more educated than say in the US.
b) They rely heavily on the public service who are experienced to do the heavy lifting.
c) The jobs aren't in the areas that matter for Federal elections.
His real crime was playing a part in destroying the fibre to the premise internet rollout across Australia. He thought he could do it cheaper with mixed copper/coaxial technology.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/10/malcolm-turnbu...
I can't imagine how many billions this has cost the country and generally lowered our internet standards.
If the government forces Google to push out a version of FacebookMessenger.apk to the Play Store account belonging to janetlovescats93@gmail.com, which uploads hourly plaintext chat logs to a Google Drive folder that authorities can read, then I'm really not sure what the mathematics of Facebook Messenger's encryption can do?
As exhibit 'A' for the counterargument, I offer Kate Worden: NT's Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Water Security. Did you see her interview in Monday's "Water Grab" report by 4 Corners [1]?
One example of her logic: Farmers are planting circular fields, which is what you do for a central pivot water irrigation system, and Woden is saying with a straight face that irrigation is not being used and the cotton crop is only relying on rainfall with no dams or groundwater extraction involved.
Some choice words from the interview are that she is "sick of the science". There are lots of other goodies.
Her interview is a masterclass in ignorance.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/11/15/chile-wants-to-export...
Also, is it just so heavy that it doesn't need to be secured?
People setup undersea telegraph cables the 1800’s. This is similar technology just with a thicker cable to carry more current etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
I also would like a magic pony.
At this scale it's not even mainly financial, it's opportunity cost and geopolitical considerations, on both the pro- and con- side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champlain_Hudson_Power_Express
This is why they aren’t breaking things up into several shorter hops to various islands on the way.
20GW solar farm, 42GWh battery, 3 cables totalling 12,900km of HVDC cable, $23 billion cost.
Also the way data packets go - they can go literally from any of the lines and get assembled together somewhere in the network layer. But same doesn’t hold true for 3 phase power. So same that works for internet wouldn’t be applicable for power distribution.
It passed government environmental requirements, a milestone for the (private sector) project’s promoters. Articles should be read a touch more carefully and cynically before jumping to outrage surely?
I would have guessed there must be enough domestic customers or in Indonesia that would make more sense.
It might or might not be a good idea. But you need to then compare those massive investments to the relatively modest investment of the power cable to bring the electricity to a part of that world that already has all the other infrastructure needed, and also already has lots of water.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220499
If Australia refined _all_ of the 40,000kt of Bauxite we export each year into "frozen electricity" Aluminium, that'd only require about 600GWh, or about 4% of the 1.7GW 24x7, or 15,000GWh per year this would send to Singapore.
Large datacenter are in the 100MW sort of range, so only single digit GWh per year.
Australia generates a few hundred TWh per year. 272 TWh in 2021/22 - or 272,000GWh, around 20 times what this project will export to Singapore.
Data centers and Aluminium and Iron smelters are big electricity consumers. But they barely even move the needle compared to cities with millions of households.
Natural resource sales send USD to Australia. AUD is now worth more because it is backed by more USD. Manufactured exports are also traded in USD, so Australian exports become much more expensive because workers and local materials are paid for in AUD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxide#Production
[2] https://www.mining.com/web/aluminum-price-hits-13-year-high-...
Turns out when you do the math right, Aluminium _is_ frozen electricity.
Land is in tight demand with food a priority over panels and issues that may not be apparent (clear slopes leads to instability, and keeping them clear is a Sisyphean task, etc).
Places with offshore wind are also looking at it as a way to share cables.
See map for traces of storms:
https://reliefweb.int/attachments/da3ff0e6-13fc-311c-b9b1-dd...
Bonus challenge, can you find Japan, who are piloting this tech, on that map. They're in there somewhere under the squiggles.
I don't hunt whales but I do have first hand direct experience of marine engineering in exactly that region.
Shopping calculations for them need not be about economic cost benefit analysis.
But there's also no good reason not to apply cost/benefit analysis.
> Singapore with a native population of about 4 million has reserves of about $1 trillion. They can afford to splurge to claim green/net-zero status.
Of all numbers to bring up here, why did you pick foreign exchange reserves? GDP or wealth might be more relevant?
Reserves are cash in hand and represent immediate and hard spending power.
So? These _benefits_ also fit into a bog standard cost/benefit analysis. For example, Singapore would need to weight this project against buying everyone a luxury handbag..
Btw, in any case keep in mind that the project is privately financed and will make money selling electricity to Singaporeans. The electrons that power my gadgets at home don't have any colour, so I can't even tell if my electricity comes from a particularly prestigious source. It's all intermediated by the wholesale market.
> Reserves are cash in hand and represent immediate and hard spending power.
That's about on the same level as arguing that having a money printing press represents raw spending power.
Most central banks around the world conduct monetary policy via domestic interest rates and affect these interest rates by buying and selling domestic government bonds. Thus they will have lots of government bonds on their balance sheet. But it doesn't mean that they can just take these bonds and use them to buy solar farms.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore is (almost?) unique in foregoing interest rate as a channel of monetary policy, and instead working via the foreign exchange rate. They affect the foreign exchange rate by buying foreign currencies via freshly minted Singapore dollars (or selling them to remove Singapore dollars from the market).
And just like the American Fed keeps the government bonds they buy on their balance sheet (and pretty much has to!), our Monetary Authority of Singapore keeps the foreign currency on the balance sheet, and they show up as reserves.
By design, Singapore has at least as much in foreign exchange reserves as we issued domestic currency.
In a sense, most of the eg Euros in our reserves are already 'spent', but they are spent in the form of SGD in circulation. (I say 'most', because we have more reserves than we issued SGD. Singapore is cautious like that.)
they're doing unrealistic nuclear proposals, because they know it takes a long time to ramp up, and in the mean time, their buddies' investments in the coal industry gets time to exit and profit properly. It's designed to prevent losses in fossil fuel investments.
Not to mention that australian nuclear cannot be profitable imho - not when solar is so cheap. Their current proposals for nuclear basically requires taxpayer subsidies.
https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flo...
"Nuclear followed the learning curve up until about 1970, when it inverted and costs started rising"
Nuclear is so safe--even fully factoring in the accident at Chernobyl--that people very occasionally falling off rooftops when installing solar panels is a bigger health hazard per Joule produced.
There's lots of dangerous chemicals involved in both the production of solar panels (and semiconductor technology in general) and also in the production of nuclear fuel. And those have to be handled carefully and responsibly, to avoid causing problems like cancer.
Note: I'm deliberately not talking about radiation, because it's basically not a factor. You can live right next to a nuclear power plant, or even work in one, and your radiation exposure will be indistinguishable from background levels. Working as an airplane flight attendant (or even at the top of a really tall building or on a mountain) is much more dangerous in that regard.
According to https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-sources-and-doses even just living in Denver exposes you to a lot more radiation, because of the altitude.
Because of this are a bunch of safety protocols in the extraction, transportation, storage and use of radio active materials and their waste products.
100% sure that all of the chemicals involved in Solar manufacture are less toxic to the human body than handling Plutonium. So, we can probably design enough protocols to make it safe to manufacture given we did it for far more toxic materials.
> You can live right next to a nuclear power plant, or even work in one, and your radiation exposure will be indistinguishable from background levels.
So they dug up and replaced all the surface soil around Fukushima for no reason?
Concentrated Hydroflouric acid, and even pure fluorine gas however? That can be an easy turn of a tap away at most semiconductor plants. And much worse. And if you know anything about Florine, ‘much worse’ should be pretty chilling.
I’m honestly not sure if radiation poisoning (actually quite hard and rare to die from) is worse than dying from fluorine exposure (I’m sure it’s killed a lot more people than radiation), but fluorine is certainly going to be faster.
Most fire departments are going to be a lot more concerned about a semiconductor plant than a nuclear one.
The fabrication of of panels is more analogous to fission material mining. As in you are procuring the materials that will produce energy in the future.
If we get rid of nuclear power, we don't need to mine those things anymore. If we get rid of solar panels, we still need semiconductors. So I don't think you can use it for an argument against solar manufacture.
Why make it binary? Nuclear power plants need less semiconductors per Joule of electricity produced than solar panels.
So obviously they don't 'remove' the need for semiconductors. But they decrease it ever so slightly compared to solar power.
Just to be clear: the dangers per Joule from the whole lifecycle of both solar power and nuclear power are both really, really small.
The more semiconductors you make, the more waste chemicals you produce (and use), and the more contamination and cancer you’re going to have if those chemicals aren’t handled correctly. Aka more solar panels, more waste chemicals.
Same with nukes and nuclear waste by running your nuclear plant longer/harder.
90/10 one way will produce a lot of one thing, and less of another - and vice versa.
So?
You have to look at the amount of chemicals required to produce 1 Joule (or perhaps to install one 1 Watt of capacity).
For example, 1 kg of coal is much less dangerous than 1 kg of uranium. But you need much, much more than 1kg of coal to replace 1 kg of uranium.
Similar for solar power: you need to normalise the amount (and 'badness') of waste by the amount of energy produced. Semi-conductor manufacturing isn't exactly like organic farming, you know?
The best example is perhaps hydro-power: 1 kg of fresh water is basically the most harmless substance you can think of. But you need enormous amounts of water to produce reasonable amounts of electricity. And in these huge quantities water can become dangerous.
> > You can live right next to a nuclear power plant, or even work in one, and your radiation exposure will be indistinguishable from background levels.
> So they dug up and replaced all the surface soil around Fukushima for no reason?
Huh? Fukushima was not a normally operating nuclear power plant. Yes, accidents happen. That's why I'm suggesting to look at the impact of accidents per Joule produced (or per Watt of installed capacity, depending on context).
Nuclear power has had only a handful of accidents and lots and lots of Joule produced.
And ignore common sense that leaving inert rocks in the sun is fundamentally less dangerous than super heating water with highly toxic and unstable materials.
If you can't see your bias here, I don't think I am going to change your mind.
Even by your joule measure, give it time, Solar will beat that too. And even if the largest solar farm in existence started to fail or "not operate normally" we would not have to replace the top soil or bury it in sand for 20,000 years.
Huh? It's the opposite! Being around for longer is worse for nuclear for this metric. Nuclear has a small risk of catastrophic failure (especially when used with outdated, bad designs and when operators make careless mistakes). If you only observe nuclear for a short time, say between inception to 1980, or between 1990 to 2010, that metric would look really good, because we got lucky during those times and didn't have any 'jackpots' in the accident lottery.
> And ignore common sense that leaving inert rocks in the sun is fundamentally less dangerous than super heating water with highly toxic and unstable materials.
Huh? What does common sense have to do with anything? We have actual numbers. The realised dangers come not so much from operating already installed solar panels, but mostly from (a) accidents while installing the panels, especially rooftop residential solar, and (b) the chemicals used when producing them.
Overall solar power is very, very safe over its whole life cycle; and that also includes the two dangers listed above.
> Even by your joule measure, give it time, Solar will beat that too. And even if the largest solar farm in existence started to fail or "not operate normally" we would not have to replace the top soil or bury it in sand for 20,000 years.
I don't understand your point. Yes, solar power is pretty neat, I already agree.
But we already have data showing that solar power is more dangerous than nuclear per Joule produced. We roughly know how many people slip and fall off roofs when installing solar panels. (And we have good estimates for how many people died because of nuclear accidents and because of routine operations etc.)
And yes, I agree, that accidents while installing solar panels are a ridiculously small danger per Joule of electricity produced. It's just that both nuclear power and solar power are so safe, that if you insist on making a comparison between the two, these very tiny dangers are what tips the scale.
You could also just be pragmatic and say: both of them are vastly more than 'safe enough' and any difference is pretty close to zero.
I'm fairly sure solar power will 'win' over nuclear. Mostly because it's actually politically possible to install new solar power quickly and cheaply.
Every new solar panel is a win for humanity.
Solar panels are semiconductor based (the actual power generating parts are diodes, specifically).
If the chemicals are disposed of properly and workers wear the correct PPE, there are no measurable increases in cancer.
It’s a whole grab bag of chemicals, from TCE, Chromic Acid, Crystalline Silica, etc. etc. 130+ common ones with significant carcinogenic potential.
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209379112...]
It’s similar to Nuclear. If proper precautions are followed? No increased risk.
If not, well - I’m unaware of any of the actinides that are good for anyone to be around. For starters.
Btw, just to be clear: overall both solar power and nuclear are very good technologies in terms of overall harm done per Joule produced. Much, much better than coal or oil. But we shouldn't pretend that the harm per Joule is literally zero; and we should also be honest about what harm there actually is, and not just what sounds plausible or good.
Maybe I read it wrong, but I don't see anything supporting the statement: "Nuclear is so safe--even fully factoring in the accident at Chernobyl--that people very occasionally falling off rooftops when installing solar panels is a bigger health hazard per Joule produced."
Nuclear safety events are rare, rarely fatal, but can be very large in impacted area.
1) The risk of evacuations happening is tiny and I'm not even convinced it is still a factor. We've not yet seen a messy meltdown of any plant designed and built after Chernobyl in 1986 and designs have changed a lot since then.
2) We don't know what a large-scale solar disaster looks like yet, but they might happen. For example I recall the Wikipedia page for the Year Without Summer [0] - we know that sometimes nature puts things in the atmosphere that might hamper solar in a way that nuclear can be designed around. IE, we might find we now have a risk of our power stations just deciding to produce less one year because of a usually unrelated disaster. Or maybe even stop if there is enough volcanic ash.
Plus renewable projects have had a more noticeable association with grid failures and mishaps than nuclear projects. We really don't have much experience with what mass solar failures (if they do exist, but they probably do) look like or how common they are.
Solar relies on Light, just like life does. So you are kind of referring to mass extinction events. no?
We have, to date, 0 methods of generating electricity at scale that are free of catastrophic failure modes. Solar will not be free of them either, and we don't really have the data yet to figure out how they compare relevant to nuclear ones (which, on balance, are the mildest of all the tested options!). It could do well, it could do badly, but it is not entirely fair to compare a known low risk in nuclear to an unknown risk in solar.
> So you are kind of referring to mass extinction events. no?
No, I'm not. I included a wiki link to the sort of thing I think could be a problem. It doesn't mention extinction.
The idea of a global darkness for a significant period of time, would be extinction level.
> The idea of a global darkness for a significant period of time, would be extinction level.
Your scenario not mine; and I don't know why it needs to be global. I'm talking a 12-month period with much less sunshine than normal. A scenario which other sources of power would be independent of but that solar would be very correlated with. Since the nuclear disasters we've seen so far can be escaped by walking away from them slowly, that sort of rare volcanic event influencing solar production would probably be more damaging than a nuclear plant meltdown. It could kill a lot of people.
It is similar to Fukushima where the fact that they had an unsafe nuclear plant that maybe roughly doubled the damage caused by the tsunami that hit Japan. Heavy solar use might do something similar with big volcanic eruptions. We don't really know because we've never tried mass solar use before so it is a bit hard to judge how bad catastrophic failures are vs. nuclear.
I guess I'm envisioning a future where there is a lot more solar panels than there is consumption, meaning we can store for later or transmit to places that cannot generate themselves.
Storing throughout the seasons is much harder. (But then, you can probably use a cable to give Germany electricity in winter from solar farms in the Sahara or so.)
Sticking to the 1812 scenario; that is a substantially harder problem to solve than putting the nuclear plants somewhere extremely remote and moving power to where it is needed. I'm not convinced you're really thinking about the cost-effectiveness of the redundancies you're suggesting here.
I wouldn't say impossible, but I would say there is room here for a solar catastrophe to turn out to be worse than a nuclear one. It is hard to overemphasise how mild the nuclear industry has been so far in terms of harm done - even including the catastrophes. Places like Fukushima apparently have exclusion zone limits of 50 millisieversts per year [0]. That is almost a third of what humans left to their own devices live with when left to their own devices with no local panic [1]. We're talking damage done that is right on the threshold of our ability to even detect it. It won't take that many sigmas of a correlated outage for solar panels to do worse than that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#New...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar%2C_Iran#Radioactivity
And don't get me wrong: solar is mostly fine anyway. It's coal that's really obnoxious. Both in the mining and in the burning, and in the accidents. (And to a lesser degree other fossil fuels.)
Photovoltaic is great! On a purely technical level both solar and nuclear can work well, nuclear perhaps a bit better and we had the technology for longer. On a practical level, solar will win, because people fear nuclear.
All electricity generation methods have engineering challenges. Eg solar has some big problems with daily variations and seasonal ones. We can solve the former with batteries, and the latter via big cables to (sub-) tropical regions.
Wind is also great! And we've only just started tapping waves and tides, too. And geothermal.
the real problem with nuclear is that the market is small, fragmented, US regulations are bad (as I elaborated upthread), so there's no real volume, no economies of scale, no healthy competition and there's basically no innovation even around the safety critical core...
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/news/2024/may/csiro-release...
Meanwhile nuclear is feasible in China, South Korea, maybe in the UK (who are well into sunk cost on their next reactor already), and probably in the US.
And in that time span as well, solar power will increase its efficiency.
And then batteries, to store and deliver that power outside of generation hours, are a parallel to that.
If a nuclear power plant could be built quickly and simply, the equation would be different.
Unfortunately, from the limited amount that I've read, nuclear power plant projects often run over time and over budget, exacerbating the time scale issue I described above.
Solar power is just amateures littering compared to that.
In turn, that means voltages can be higher, letting one use more of the cheaper PVC or XLPE insulating material and less expensive aluminium for the same amount of energy delivered a large number of kilometers.
To be honest, I don't think we're many decades away from the cable+conversion stations themselves cost being irrelevant, and the administration costs, land purchase costs, etc dominating.
Aluminium is far less dense, which in turn makes the whole cable bigger, which has other costs (eg. fewer kilometers of cable fit in a boat). Usually it's still the best choice overall though.
On top of that, you also have losses to the cables capacitance with AC.
But DC has the cost of the conversion stations to consider - both capital cost and efficiency causing operational cost.
I suppose you mean AC-DC conversion stations. Assuming only solar energy will be "pumped" over the wire, then the "only" conversion stations that are needed are at the consumer, right? I said it before, I don't know much about electricity, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
It’s comparatively quite easy to make transformers that work at million+ volts.
So anytime you need to do any sort of voltage boosting, conversion, or the like, DC is going to be expensive and relatively fragile compared to AC.
If it’s just once, that’s not bad. If it’s often, that sucks.
You can split (or add up) the million volts as transmitted at either end so the individual components only work across a small fraction of the 1MV potential difference. This is how can get 12V from 1.5V batteries or use 1V LEDs from a 12V line.
At very high (million+ volts) we’re talking even quantum tunneling effects producing enough current to cause material breakdowns. It’s pretty nuts.
It’s a big reason why glass and ceramic are so commonly used at those voltages as insulators - they are one of the few materials stable enough and electrically insulating enough to last long term.
Splitting things up like being discussed works when it’s possible to do so without creating even more leakage current paths, which is extremely difficult to do with sizable equipment in the million+ volt range. Folks eventually were able to do so, which is why HVDC eventually became a thing, but it is far from easy or cheap. My understanding is almost all HVDC lines run at lower voltages than their equivalent AC counterparts do as well, due to these technical limitations.
HVDC currently tends to be used for longer runs, where AC inductive losses exceed the equivalent capital costs challenges HVDC has. AC has significant inductive loss issues when run under ground or undersea.
At low voltages, those same leakage currents can’t transmit enough power to damage things or even cause measurable power losses, so don’t matter.
These effects starts being noticable in the > 1kv range, significant in the > 10kv range, quite problematic in the > 100kv range, and very difficult (maybe impossible using known material science in some scenarios) to deal with in the >= 1MV range.
Semiconductors have the added challenge that they often have noticeable leakage currents even in the low voltage ranges (even with specialized designs) and it makes it even harder.
[https://www.nationalgrid.com/sites/default/files/documents/1...]
Additionally, Arc faults in DC transmission infrastructure are extremely difficult to control, as unlike AC there is no zero-voltage crossing point (as there is no waveform, in general). So unlike AC, arcs are not likely to self extinguish, and require complete interruption of current flow. Which is actually a really hard problem to solve for several reasons at the power levels involved here.
Amusingly (IMHO), The band's line-up remained the same for 20 years until 2014 when Malcolm retired due to early-onset dementia, from which he died three years later; additionally, Rudd was charged with threatening to kill and possession of methamphetamine and cannabis. Stevie, who replaced Malcolm, debuted on the album Rock or Bust (2014). On the accompanying tour, Slade filled in for Rudd. In 2016, Johnson was advised to stop touring due to worsening hearing loss. So a rocker's fate: forgot what planet they were on, went mad on drugs becoming threats to society, lost their hearing, or kept touring indefinitely with a changing lineup cashing in on past glories.
Similar period https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfR9iY5y94s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_Under_(song)
The reactive component has significant impact on the generation equipment and grids. It also causes the Ferranti effect, where the voltage along the cable rises. This can make managing the voltage within the cable difficult because at no load, the load end has a higher voltage than the source, and when loaded, the middle of the cable has a higher voltage than both ends.
During stable operation these effects can be managed with Statcoms, shunt reactors and voltage regulation tap changers. However during transient operation you will be relying upon the static protective devices such as surge arrestors, depending on how large the transient is.
DC transmission does not suffer from the same reactive power component and has less losses, but it does require large convertor stations at both ends.
If you can have the conductor 1mm^2 thinner (capable of carrying less current for the same heat production) and the insulation 1mm^2 thicker (capable of handling a higher voltage) and transfer the same power, then you'd save money.
It only works up to a certain limit obviously - the relationship is non-linear and there is an optimal point.
The actual tradeoff involves a lot more modelling, because you need to consider all kinds of other factors, not just the costs of the conductor and insulator.
Why do you believe these things are related?
HVDC lines operate in the hundreds-of-kilovolts range. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink operates at 400kV. There are no MOSFETs or JFETs directly involved in stepping down that power.
Overall, they were a popular choice in the 90's and 2010's, but I don't think we'll see any new designs installed with them.
Not a big deal, if your grid can handle the loss, but this certainly can’t be the gameplan for the bulk of your power.
In Singapore's situation, they can probably invest assuming that they are not in a military conflict with anyone. If they get into a war with anyone who can cut that cable they will be returning to the stone age anyway. If Indonesia objects to them they will go, if someone with the power to coerce Indonesia objects to them they're in deep trouble.
Wikipedia gives an estimate of $1.47 trillion for Indonesia's GDP in 2024. The estimate for Singapore is $525.228 billion. The factor seems to be less than 3x. Where do you get 5x from? Are you going by PPP or so?
> In Singapore's situation, they can probably invest assuming that they are not in a military conflict with anyone. If they get into a war with anyone who can cut that cable they will be returning to the stone age anyway. If Indonesia objects to them they will go, if someone with the power to coerce Indonesia objects to them they're in deep trouble.
You can't make those assumptions, if you don't want to be bullied. Singapore doesn't have that cable right now and we ain't in the stone age. That situation ain't no different from having a cable, but it being cut.
> You can't make those assumptions, if you don't want to be bullied. Singapore doesn't have that cable right now and we ain't in the stone age.
You aren't at war either as far as I know, and hopefully it stays that way. But if Singapore happens to be at war with someone who thinks cutting that cable is a good option then the stone age beckons. And not because of the cable.
Presumably those in Singapore have a lot more buying power though. And the politics are more favourable for big capital investment projects.
The solar farm powering this Suncable project is 12,000 hectares, or 120 sq km. So the solar farm is 1/6th the size of Singapore. Although Singapore is only planning to buy around 1/3rd of the capacity, so maybe this'd be equivalent to only 40 sq km, or 1/20th the size of Singapore.
I suspect there are more profitable uses to the Singapore economy for land reclamation than dropping solar panels on it?
The vast majority of Singaporeans live in apartments they own, and don't pay rent. However you are right that most of these apartments were built by an arm of the government, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_and_Development_Board
There are grants for lower income people to make it easier for them to buy a home. Some people also rent directly from the government, but that's the exception. Most own.
Housing ain't cheap in Singapore. Whether you measure that in terms of rent, or in terms of monthly mortgage costs, or in terms of the opportunity cost of capital (for those who own their homes outright). As everywhere else in the world that's mostly a function of supply and demand, and where that supply comes from (public, private, etc) doesn't really matter too much.
Singapore has been building a lot of housing, and is still building a lot of housing. Both by public and private developers. But we are living on a small island with lots of people, and thanks mostly to immigration our population is still growing. (I myself am an immigrant here.)
Oh, I thought you were talking about power stations in general, not only photovoltaic.
Yes, there are more profitable uses in Singapore. Though for many uses you can add some solar panels on top of eg roofs of buildings.
Australia is a big place. The northern tip of Australia, where this project is based, isn't really that much further from Singapore than from the Australian population centres in the South East of the continent.
Indonesia is much poorer than Singapore, and has awfully inefficient bureaucracy and regulatory environment.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/billionaire-cannon-b...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-11/sun-cable-enters-admi...
I guess MCB found a way to make it work pending future investment that may not occur until 2027: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-21/suncable-receives-env...
> The approval paves the way for the next phase of development to deliver industrial-scale electricity to customers. But it still has some way to go, with a final investment decision not expected until 2027.
and
> However, SunCable still needs to negotiate Indigenous land use agreements with a number of different traditional owner groups along the transmission line route to Darwin.
I understand that it would take much more than just the cable between the two continents to make this work - right now there are issue on the continents themselves to get the electricity from one place to another. But with the sun shining most of the time on one of those two continents and with other (hopefully renewable) energy sources on either side of the pond, we might get to have green and cheap energy!
Alas during the previous Trump presidency, Europe saw that modern Republican 'America First' thinking doesn't just call for a wall with Mexico, a travel ban with Muslim countries, and a trade war with China - it also wants a trade war with Europe.
And linking the south of Spain to the north of Morocco only needs ~200km of undersea cable, rather than the ~6000km an EU-to-US link would call for. That's a pretty big benefit.
This is already in the works and secured financing recently. It’s a smaller link but it’s a start. Also Tunisia trade electricity with Libya and Algeria; so technically they could be selling electricity to Europe through that link.
https://www.current-news.co.uk/uk-us-transatlantic-interconn...
Weirdly enough the latter is projected to cost less than the now infamous Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant.
By the way, do you know what cost the most money on the HPC project? Loan interests, by a very large margin. Because of the risk of project failure given the lack of government guarantees, they had to borrow at a baffling 9% interest rate in a world if zero interest rate. This is the insanity that drove the cost to the sky, not the engineering side of things.
That sounds very interesting, do you happen to have a source nearby? I would love to have that one in my back pocket next time i end up in a discussion on nuclear power.
Anyway, in my comment I was referring to the original estimate of £22bln, which is higher than the £18bln for that HVDC project and that's disregarding inflation.
And it's like that with every nuclear power project in Europe and the US, save for the one in Belarus, though it needs to be said there were some complaints about corner-cutting there - seems to be doing fine for now, knocking on wood.
This is the first time I've heard of this, so I did a little digging.
> Lazard assumes investors want a return of 12% and bond holders will accept an interest payment of 8%. These are kept standard across all types of generation as the intention is not to assess the risk of the project but instead the competitiveness of the technology.
> If Hinkley was to pay these commercial rates, the project construction with interest would balloon out to close to $70b. But they didn’t and digging into EDF’s financial statements shows interest costs related to construction was only 1% of capitalised costs in 2017 and 4% in 2021.
https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/nuclear-economics-less...
The Finacial Times article from 2023 puts the cost increase elsewhere:
> The increase, caused by surges in material prices several billion above the most recent estimates, is nearly 80 per cent more than the cost of £18bn in 2016, when EDF first started work on the project.
https://www.ft.com/content/ae5fb399-08ce-4045-bb70-45a6531ac...
And directly from the horse's mouth, in the EDF's status update from 2024:
> The costs of completing the project are now estimated at between £31 billion and £34 billion in 2015 values. The cost of civil engineering and the longer duration of the electromechanical phase (and its impact on other work) are the two main reasons for this cost revision. If the risk of an additional delay of 12 months mentioned above in the final scenario does materialise it would result in an estimated additional cost of around £1 billion in 2015 values.
https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/journ...
----
The only reference to the 9% figure you mentioned comes from a BBC article from 2018
> However, Dieter Helm, professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford, told the BBC that the government shift made sense.
> "The sheer cost of building new nuclear power stations means it makes sense for the government to help finance projects like this," he said.
> "Governments can borrow much more cheaply that private companies and that lower cost of borrowing can drastically reduce the ultimate cost. Hinkley Point C would have been roughly half the cost if the government had been borrowing the money to build it at 2%, rather than EDF's cost of capital, which was 9%."
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44363366
I couldn't verify it anywhere else though. Can you point to a source from the EDF that confirms the loan interests cost the most money on the Hinkley Point C project?
https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Po...
Part 1.18 (page 22):
> "For example, if we assume the government financed the project and required a 2% return (nominal, equivalent to its borrowing cost)..."
Part 2.3 (page 27):
> "The investors expect their return on the project to be 9.04% over the 60-year operating life of HPC."
Also see Figure 19 on page 65, which summarises the different financing options, ranging from 100% state, the actual HPC deal, to 100% private.
Notice how the table of different outcomes shows changes in cost to taxpayers/government, returns, and the strike price. It doesn't show changes to the total construction cost itself, which is presumably fixed no matter what the financing option is. If the grandparent comment was correct, the table would have shown a different construction cost for different financing options.
All that's different is the strike price - which makes sense.
On top of that there is the energy security problem, even if Morocco is less likey than Russia to try and play tricks.
I wish them all luck, but we can't forget the advantages projects has before leaving Excel.
A cable this long will be vulnerable to attack by any country that has submarines.
How is it going to be guarded?
And that guarding, probably by thoughts and prayers, aka diddly squat.
> "... Renewable energy developer Sun Cable has secured approval from the Australian government for the Australian element of its Australia-Asia Power Link (AAPowerLink) interconnector. ..."
So they have licence to make the PV farm, and to cable it to a head-end, and to run HVDC to the edge of Australian Exclusive Maritime Zone.
What happens after that is still subject to other people.
There's hope of a domestic customer as well. That's important because the location is pretty unpopulated and otherwise under-developed. Prospects for onshore HVDC to customers are low right now: the closest thing is a service called "Copperstring" targetting the mining/metals industry being done in Qld but its about 1000km away and there are few customers except at the end of a long line
That aside, Darwin and Port infra will be there but on the normalised "3 million homes" model of scaling Darwin is 60,000 homes or less.
Meanwhile the peak of solar generation around midday in Australia is being sent off to Singapore in the morning who are a couple hours behind us. Presumably the morning is when the least AC will be used there. By the evening in Singapore, it'll be night in Central Australia, meaning there will still have to be plenty of peaking generation or, will need a massive ton of batteries which has still not quite there for grid scaling.
If this project is viable, then it'll probably be more viable to have a massive solar farm coming from India, where the timezone shift is in the correct direction, and it would outcompete Australia.
So either way you need batteries, and all the problems they bring. Just about "how many".
Edit: I'd also like to add that for something cheap and mass manufactured that we shouldn't concern ourselves with, we sure don't have a lot of it on a grid that already delivers some of the most expensive power in the world. ie one that should be able to afford it a lot more than others
I did originally see a graphic which showed somewhere around Broome as the connection point.
“May 2023, a consortium led by Cannon-Brookes' Grok Ventures won the bid to acquire Sun Cable,[7] with the takeover finalised on 7 September 2023. The revised plans involve supplying electricity to Darwin by 2030, and to Singapore a few years thereafter. ”
I hope that the decommissioning of this kind of solar farm is better managed thant the likes of the Northern Endeavour FPSO, where Woodside offloaded it to a small company to dodge the decommissioning costs of the field, leaving the taxpayer to foot the bill[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link [1] https://www.industry.gov.au/mining-oil-and-gas/oil-and-gas/o...
Maybe there are already vast fields of solar panels like that, and I just haven't seen it before?
I feel like I saw it at imax, but it seems an odd topic for an imax movie?
So presumably this whole bit of climate theater has a lovely feel good story.
And it does not prevent any other private investment projects to generate and sell green electricity to Australians. Australia isn't exactly short of sunshine, and the Chinese will happily sell you all the solar panels that you could ever want.
I'm must completely be missing something. We can't get renewables into our own grid let alone over the hemisphere.
And yes, I did do the maths; and also yes it's really just China at the "global terrawatt" scale (they've become a dominant aluminium supplier), but a much smaller distance and power rating is probably fine even if China doesn't sell you the metal.
With a typical HVDC line not exceeding 1200mm2 conductor cross section it's about 13k tonnes, so 0,025% of global aluminium production.
Technically right but I think you mean 1200mm2 (a radius of approx 20mm)
I actually had an autocorrect suggestion for "1200m2" in there for some reason.
Still, you could wrap the world around at the equator with this for a paltry $40bln. Now scale that 10x and you have yourself a practical global grid solution for what, $400bln? That's less than half the US military budget - absolutely doable if you get enough economies on board.
Australia is obscenely well-positioned to be a solar energy powerhouse. So much open and uninhabited land, geologically stable and uniquely suited climate with a ton of sun all year round.
Could have done it sooner with more political will, etc, etc. But I'm so over the whole renewables and climate change debate (still very much alive here sadly). We're way beyond the time for talking and into the time for action, and seeing this project pull us into a more sustainable world is awesome.
That makes for a 20h energy storage at full power, and a big enough power reserve to recharge that storage during the day while delivering at full power. Likely a reserve for morning/evening/clouds. Easy to add more storage.
So, it's a 2 GW power link, not a 20 GW power link. It's a 20 GWp site, and that's impressive too. At 200 Wp (STC) per sq m, that is 100M m², or a 6 mile square not counting any access roads. Huge, but if five of these is all it takes to power Singapore, then I guess we're looking at a bright future.
Yup, my bad. Title is wrong but I can't change it now. I was looking for quick figures and saw the solar capacity numbers and put them. It seems only about 1.75 GW are actually planned to go through that link.
p.s. @dang doesn't work, which is why I didn't respond to this sooner. For guaranteed message delivery, you (or someone) need to email hn@ycombinator.com.
We have to, otherwise the solar panels wouldn't work.
Please enough of them far away from Earth and you get pretty much unlimited energy all year round.
A solar panel in space would be highly efficient.
Even if you can turn 100% of the energy you received from space into electricity, in the end it'll all turn to heat.
Also keep in mind that cooling the hot part of your space heat pump is very limited: there's no convection nor conduction in space. You can only lose heat energy via radiation or ablation (= shooting away hot pieces).
Almost no matter what machine you are powering, be it a a toaster or a computer or an electric car or a washing machine, eventually turns all of the electric energy into heat.
(You can contrive some counter-examples. Eg if you point a sufficiently strong laser pointer at the sky, some of the energy will escape earth before turning into heat here.)
When land becomes the limiting factor on earth.
Assuming the worst-case predictions of climate change come true, there will be more than enough desert capacity along the equatorial areas to provide power for the rest.
What makes you think so? There's always more you can do with more energy. 'Never' is a long time. And there are opportunity costs from other uses you could put land on earth to.
You are right that it will be a while before remote corners on earth become more expensive than space for solar power generation. But not 'never'.
(Btw, if you think really big, the limit for how much power we can use on earth is given by how much waste heat we can radiate into space.
At some point, you don't want to keep beaming down energy from space into earth, even if you somehow could convert 100% of the received power into electricity with no losses: because at the end all the electrical power used will still turn into heat. Heat that we will have to get rid of.
At that point in time, you might want to use the electricity directly in space, eg to run data centres there, and just beam the results of the computations down.)
> Assuming the worst-case predictions of climate change come true, there will be more than enough desert capacity along the equatorial areas to provide power for the rest.
While climate change might become unpleasant, I have no clue what it has to do with any of this? The surface of the earth will stay roughly constant and so will its orbit, and the sun will shine regardless of what happens on earth. (And I assume that if you wanted to badly enough, you could easily float solar panels on top of the ocean; at least easier than blasting them into space.)
The entire world's power supply could be met by sacrificing just 3.27% of the US [1]. The Sahara desert is already economically useless as it is completely and utterly inhospitable, unable to support life beyond a few shrubs, insects and felines.
> While climate change might become unpleasant, I have no clue what it has to do with any of this?
Simple, the amount of desertified space will grow, and so space that is now unusable for solar power because it can actually be used at the moment can then be used for power.
[1] https://www.axionpower.com/knowledge/power-world-with-solar/
So? We can always grow our energy consumption to meet supply.
> Simple, the amount of desertified space will grow, and so space that is now unusable for solar power because it can actually be used at the moment can then be used for power.
The oceans are a lot bigger than all the deserts put together.
I don’t think microwave beaming is ever viable
Most fusion concepts are thermal power plants. Those have inherent downsides that have nothing to do with the nuclear energy providing the heat for the steam turbines. So they will never fully replace renewables. Helion’s concept might work. But that remains to be seen.
Taking out the rogue orbital power station would be a competition between very trigger happy militaries. Who wouldn't want to demonstrate their satellite killers on a legitimate target?
And why wouldn’t one of those powers be the ones installing such an installation in the first place?
A non trivial problem if whatever is on the ground trying to launch is being heated white hot by a maser, no?
And getting there has non trivial flight time too, plenty of time for it to be melted on its way.
Orbit is the ‘high ground’.
So what about this orbiting duck of yours, the power station recently turned rogue?
Look, the satellites you share an orbit with are adjusting their trajectories to intercept yours. Undisturbed, they will pose collision hazards within the next days. You must fry them all before they complete the adjustments. Do you have a real time feed of their position for targeting? Bet you do, you're a supervillain after all.
But some satellites are passing behind earth, they will complete their manouvers before they emerge from earth's shadow. The first hit is predicted in just 130 hours.
But hey a bunch of missiles took off on the other side of earth, they are now on a ballistic trajectory that intercepts your station's orbit. Thanks to your flawless targeting, you manage to melt some of them. Their debris will hit anyway, your station has 19 minutes left before impact.
Meanwhile, some subs poke laser scopes out of the sea, taking shots at your station. You divert your energy from the incoming missiles, but when you try to hit one, the scope is submerged again. You produce a plume of steam.
And what is this? What was supposedly a radar array starts to beam microwaves your way. Your station overheats in seconds because it has almost no mass and lots of surface. You could've taken out maybe one of the hundreds of antennas in the array if your comms hadn't already been crippled by a laser.
As you lift your gaze from the now useless controls, the sky is lit by a tactical nuke that was hiding in a spy satellite. It happened to be close enough for a crippling EMP blow.
Fin.
And any significant orbital power station is going to have to be pretty big. Or it’s pretty pointless.
Which means it’s going to have a lot of mass.
It's an often used qualifier to dodge what can turn out to be meritless predictions. Just long enough into the future to sound promising, but also far enough into the future to not tempt a need for supporting evidence.
In my view if we don't have the underpinnings or motivation today to support such forward looking statements, then there is no genuine foundation for claiming that the situation will improve merely as time moves on. Technology only comes about when we make it, and only develops rapidly when there is a significant motivation for putting serious manpower behind it.
One could just as easily say that we'll have small and portable fusion reactors that completely satisfy our energy needs.
Not at Singaporean levels of competent, but better than almost anywhere else in South East Asia.
If they feel their electricity provider is screwing with them, why not make their own? Probably even with batteries it would pay for itself given the ROI I'd guess panels have there
We in NZ are cursed with cheap power (albeit I can sell solar power to spot market at 3x of night retail rate)
Whether or not said apartment is suitable for solar however is not guaranteed. You need both a balcony large enough and in a position to capture the sun. Both things likely to push you towards the higher end of the market at 700-800k.
“Just like last year, Australia's largest capital city ranked as the second least affordable major property market in the world. With a staggering median multiple of 13.8, typical Sydney homes cost about 13 times the average household's annual income.”
1. Aging base load generation
2. Housing stock from cheap fuel times facing globalised energy prices.
3. Network assets being corporatised and partially privatised and there having been incentives for these monopolies to invest in unproductive assets for which they are permitted to recover their costs.
4. Costs of competition in the retail sector.
5. Government policy creating uncertainty in investment decisions for renewable assets.
6. The vast majority of consumption is early evening, so not much Sun.
Edit: Basic power loss formula is P=I^2R, so yes power loss is divided by 4 for a 2x increase in voltage assuming the target power delivered is held constant.
At a given power, double voltage means half current. If the resistance is kept the same, that means 4 times lower losses. If the resistance is doubled by using a thinner cable, that still results in two times lower losses.
What material would they use for the cables at those vast distances to make the numbers work ?
But, sure, worth it for the HN=referrer porn JWZ throws up, I guess?