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Comment by vlasky | Hacker News Reader

I'm Aussie and I can't believe this Sun Cable project is being taken seriously by our government.

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.

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Tasmanian energy crisis was because of a drought, not because the cable was cut. Tassie exports energy and the power company had lowered the dam levels selling power to Victoria that year expecting regular winter rain. That rain didn't happen. That, then combined with the line fault caused the issue. In fact, the suspected cause of the line issue was that the power company Tassie Hydro zapped the export line with too much current trying to make money from Victoria. That combined with the lowering of dams, perfect storm of greed and bad luck.

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.

When Tassie dams get low, they import power from the mainland. It’s a common seasonal thing. Drought + Basslink outage had the gov buying and running diesel gen at huge cost to keep the grid running. The Basslink outage made a problem a crisis.

Why would it be superlinear instead of sublinear?

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.

It's a bad idea.

They just began running a team of barges down Lake Champlain to lay 546km of cable from Quebec to NYC for $4.5B

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champlain_Hudson_Power_Express

That is nothing. Try Chile to China:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/11/15/chile-wants-to-export...

How could that even work? In some areas, surely the Pacific Ocean is deeper than any humans or deep ocean vehicles have ever been to? So would the cable be hanging across undersea chasms, or do they need to find a depth where it can be placed?

Also, is it just so heavy that it doesn't need to be secured?

Deep sea cables don’t need to be secured to anything in the middle they are really heavy and the water isn’t moving quickly.

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

A great example of bullshit megaprojects that governments announce with no real intention of ever implementing. I searched and tried to find something recent about this project. Pretty much everything I found was around the announcement in Nov 2021 - the latest article I found was this one from Jan 2022, https://dialogue.earth/en/energy/50155-chile-underwater-cabl... , which states the project "does not yet have feasibility studies or a form of financing".

I also would like a magic pony.

If they spend $100m on a feasibility study or planning work before getting shit canned for "cost blowouts" someone still got paid.

People have been stringing cables across the ocean for centuries now. What makes this so much harder?

Power cables are a wee different than communications cables.

Power cables are smaller.

China could absolutely do this if they want to, but they may well have better things to do with all the aluminium their rapidly expanding factories are producing.

At this scale it's not even mainly financial, it's opportunity cost and geopolitical considerations, on both the pro- and con- side.

You misunderstand the costs involved. The cable is cheap per km, the cost is largely HVDC equipment at either end.

This is why they aren’t breaking things up into several shorter hops to various islands on the way.

DW did a good summary of the Sun Cable Australia-Singapore project https://youtu.be/42b6xJFUSss?t=206

20GW solar farm, 42GWh battery, 3 cables totalling 12,900km of HVDC cable, $23 billion cost.

> … I can't believe this Sun Cable project is being taken seriously by our government.

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?

Its a great sound byte for the politicains. Politicians aren't known for the economic and business acumen. Sound bytes and promise of jobs get them elected.

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.

None of this really applies to Australia.

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.

Your politicans, like Malcolm Turnbull in 2017, believe that the laws of Australia trump the laws of Mathematics, in the context of trying to weaken strong encryption. In at least some areas, they need a better education.

Not the best example for a tech savvy person. He had that image as he made a heap of $$ investing in some early internet company, but yeah he didn't seem to actually know what he was doing tech wise.

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.

The laws of Australia do trump the laws of mathematics in that context though?

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?

> a) Politicians are typically more educated than say in the US.

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.

[1] https://iview.abc.net.au/show/four-corners

I think you may have missed the qualifier "typically"

These kind of projects are getting proposed because the business case is painfully simple. Buy electricity cheap and sell it high. Its arbitrage. The price difference needs to be just enough to pay for the debt that funded construction.

Just wait for one of Aussies famous dust storms to blow thru and scratch all the PV to shit....

Yes. If there’s one thing we Aussies can’t do well, it’s solar. /s

Curious if like internet cable - can there be redundancy built?

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.

The DC Cook Straight cable in New Zealand has 3 cables with one spare and one redundant. It can use the earth as a return path though, not sure if you could do that all the way to Singapore. DC doesn't have phases so it's not 3-phase, same with the Sun Cable.

It's not up to the government to determine cost feasibility of a private project.

Perhaps it's similar to the high speed rail projects that get announced and quietly shelved every election season?

Are you a fan of the show Utopia?

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