Sun Cable‘s Australia-ASEAN project is the world’s most ambitious renewable energy project yet proposed. It combines the world’s largest solar farm, the most extended undersea electricity cable, and the largest battery. It will cost about $16 billion but already has investors, including billionaires Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest and Mike Cannon-Brookes.
The solar farm will cover 30,000 acres and deliver 10 gigawatts (GWs) of power – the equivalent of nine million rooftops solar photovoltaic (PV) panels. It will be located in Australia’s sunny Northern Territory. The solar farm will deliver round-the-clock dispatch of clean power thanks to a 30 gigawatt-hour (GWh) battery storage facility on-site. That’s 155 times more energy storage capacity than the world’s largest lithium-ion battery currently in operation – Australia’s 193.5 megawatt-hours (MWh) Hornsdale Power Reserve.
Since the solar farm is located in the middle of nowhere, the project will require cables to get the power out. The plan is for an 800-kilometer high-voltage overhead power line to transmit 3 GW to Darwin on the northern coast, then a transfer to a 3,700 km 2.2 GW undersea power line that will deliver electricity to Singapore. To put the length into perspective, this project’s undersea power line is five times longer than the most extended undersea cable in the world – the 720 km Norway-to-Britain North Sea Link. Read more…
