The Australia-Asia Power Link: Record-Breaking Feats of Engineering
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- čas přidán 9. 04. 2023
- Discover the ambitious Australia-Asia Power Link project by Sun Cable, aiming to build the world's largest solar plant, largest battery, and longest submarine power cable to send clean energy from Australia to Singapore and Indonesia. Learn about the challenges and opportunities of this game-changing endeavor.
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It's already gone under. The two billionaire backers parted ways. Also, that route is unfeasible to to unstable geology and deep trenches. It's why Browse gas goes to Darwin rather than Timor which is much closer. It would be very expensive by the time it got to Singapore.
Yup, the project went into voluntary administration in January of 2023. The project seems pretty much dead at this point.
@@MayaPosch aww crap!
Could the gas not be exported as lng considering the massive demand in asia for gas and to cut coal power. Shipping cost would be lower ,much faster to meet seasonal demand change and offset reliance on Russian and more distant middle east gas supply. Shipping lng is expensive so shorter delivery is obviously a plus.
@Stephen Doherty a lot of the gas fields in the Timor Sea like Greater Sunrise are closer to Timor Timur than Australia but the pipes come to Australia and gets exported from Darwin LNG or Icthys LNG.
@@stephendoherty8291 Where do you think Australia exports all it's LNG too, sorry to say Australia was world number 1 LNG exporter until USA took over it.
Russia wasn't even rank 4 in world as LNG exporter and show you listened to CCN too much thinking Russia mattered.
Why China not taking over SCS is important in case try stopping Australian exports.
World number 1 or 2 in most resources to the world.
The argument between Forest and Brookes has to do with which tech that they use. Forest wants to use the power generated to power electrolysers in order to create and export green hydrogen. Whereas Brookes is in favour of sticking to the original plan.
Personally, I’d like to see a combination of the two projects. Firstly build the green Hydrogen plants. Kero enough on site to power Darwin 24/7 from renewable energy and then export the rest. Then use the profits derived from the export of the Hydrogen to fund the next phase of the project. Though I would be connecting to Jakarta first and then continuing on to Singapore. Who knows in the future, the system could be expanded to add connections to Indonesias new capital of Nusantara and another connection to Port Moresby in PNG.
Yes, I think using the excess energy to power a local hydrogen/ammonia or some other industrial chemical plant makes a lot of sense to me. That way you have near infinite choice in where these energy intensive products end up rather than hard-wiring yourself to singular foreign consumers which would no doubt try to negotiate power supply contracts to be in their favor.
You are all dreaming !
Why stop there? You're already in the Valeriepieris circle for those locations, sell it to the entire circle! ie half the global population
Australia contains six states-New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, and Tasmania-and two internal territories-the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, which contains Canberra. I have never heard them referred to as provinces.
Because they are not provinces!
@@AlphaGeekgirl Exactly.
same same though, many external territories
Aren't they provinces? A province is anything that's a division of a sovereign state, but has its own government. It doesn't have to have "province" in the name. US states are provinces, for example.
@@danwylie-sears1134 That's America. Where people shoot schools up. Find one example of an Australian calling any state or territory a province. lol...
Minor note: atlassian ACQUIRED Trello. They had their own project management software called Jira, and they didn't like that people were using Trello without their permission. Classic "buy 'em out boys" move, but at least they didn't just throw Trello in the trash
If they killed trello, someone would make a new trello.
As an American, I really appreciate using Shaq as a measurement unit, other wise I would have never grasped the sheer size.
😂
God knows using a metric measurement would not have been comprehensible to you
I'm a Canadian myself... we measure in both Metric and Shaqs.
A mine site in WA called Christmas creek has a MASSIVE solar farm they use to offset the diesel they use and to great effect. I just really hope we use these solar farms all over Australia as we definitely have enough sunlight to make it worthwhile
should also add the Christmas creek solar farm powers 2 massive mine sites
Diesel can be replaced by solar and battery storage. Can you envisage solar farms with battery storage along all major highways and byways so that electric truck transportation of goods can take place. Also eletric trains from Adelaide to Darwin and Sydney to Perth ect. made possible by solar farms. I think it is possible and I wish it were in my life time.
Depends where u are, in Victoria solars quite useless considering it's overcast or raining 80% of the year.
I hope they can work out the details and find success in this. We need to find out if solar is going to be viable for large-scale and these are the types of projects to do that. Good on you, Aussies, for giving it a try!
I can tell you that right now. No. Least of all without a revolution in battery technology.
What we should doing is building new nuclear power plants and going full force into R&D of thorium based nuclear pants.
As it is, conventional nuclear is already far and away the safest and cleanest technology we have on a watt for watt basis. It has achieved this in spite of being designed for submarines more than civilian needs and in addition to public ignorance and fear holding back technological advancement and new construction. Our existing plants are mostly very old, with old tech being pushed way passed it's intended service life and it's still beating everything else.
@@zackw4941 Yeah, it's been long overdue to revisit nuclear. There have been multiple safe and clean ways to do it, from the very beginning. I think we can do that, as well as continue to work with these new technologies, to find a better way.
@@zackw4941 The Uranium in Aircraft Carriers and Submarine Powerplants is Weapons Grade mate. The small Reactors used in them came long after they'd made regular Nuclear Power Stations. They needed the Regular Stations to enrich the Uranium for the small Reactors used in Boats. Modern Small reactors use far more enriched Uranium than was used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reactors for the Navy came way later than anything else Nuclear. India is leading the World in Thorium Reactors, and they've only just got their Breeder Reactor working at full pace 35 years after starting the program. Thorium/Molten Salt is not an instant solution by any measure.
@@tsubadaikhan6332 No, Thorium is not ready for prime time. That's why I said we need to go harder into R&D. The basic concept has been proven and sitting in the table for LONG time now..
There are different variations and fuel cycles for 'conventional' reactors. The basic concepts are mostly pretty similar, as far as I understand. This basic configuration was designed to meet the needs of submarines and enable fuel cycles that produce weaponizable materials. After that, R&D into other methods didn't seem cost effective, when we already had something that worked.
Seeing as one new U.S. aircraft costs per unit 13 billion with program cost 37 billion this seems a very uncostly idea. Oil products won't get cheaper and they already have far more long lasting and detrimental affects ongoing.
Nearly all of Australia is sunny. As such, it makes more sense to implement solar energy locally rather than have all PV cells in one region in the remote area.
However, the grid is not up to it
Have you ever been to victoria or tasmania? LOL
yup exactly. Yes there are limits, such as Melbourne :) but this location is closer to Asia than Australian cities, so makes no sense to build there & transport over 2000kms to Aussie cities when we could just build the panels on roofs in said cities
Not politically it doesn't. The more remote the area, the less people who might complain that you're screwing them over.
@@SoMuchFacepalm I didn't hear a single person complain when the SA government put panels & batteries onto government housing (and gave the occupants free/discounted energy in return for it)
I used to supply electrical hardware for commercial solar installations. (In Australia) Not farms, mostly rooftop on shopping centres etc. Biggest was 1.08 megawatts. The industry sure had a lot of cowboys. One caught fire, luckily only a small section. Pushing stuff right to it's electrical limits on top of a hot roof isn't ideal.
Australia has a lot of cowboy type of tradies unfortunately.
Though they are not looking for extra costs, paying transit fees to Indonesia would help get them on side. They might even agree to a lower rate during capital cost recovery, and a higher rate during the subsequent period.
Bataan Nuclear Power Plant: Allow me to introduce myself.
If I recall correctly the trouble began with the local electric supplier refusing to allow the first operational parts of the farm to hook in their power; cynics might suspect the supplier wanted to hobble a competitor but they assured everyone it was over legitimate concerns whether the solar project could synchronise its supply with the local grid's AC.
Cheers mate 😎 👌
Northern Territory is not just one climate... while a lot of it is dry desert, it is still very much tropical and wet in the North.
Trade skills in mining and heavy industry installation and continued maintenance projects (of which Australia has a large skilled workforce) definitely transfers to green energy projects. If anything, green energy is simpler to install and maintain and the overall project is less complex than mining operations from what I’ve personally seen on job sites.
The areas I think would require training and investment in the workforce would be in manufacturing and production of green energy equipment. Turbines, blades, solar panels etc although manufacturing would likely be outsourced to India or somewhere. As much as I’d like things to be produced at home, it may not be cost effective.
In my mind this is a perfect path forward for Australia, we can utilise our skilled workforce as we phase out mining and become significant energy suppliers to all of Asia.
1:25 - Chapter 1 - The vision
7:25 - Chapter 2 - Development & problems
11:20 - Chapter 3 - Implications for the future
I am looking forward to working on this project if and when we can get a start date
This is exactly what I was talking friends about energy generation in Africa and cables to Europe for transportation.
Difference of course that Australia has a single stable government, almost no religious extremists, terrorists or warlords.
Is this possible for Europe? Absolutely, Morocco is looking at similar projects. But for a large Sahara/Sudan wide plan? It would face huge challenges.
Tasmanian here just checking in to say that all our energy is renewable down here, mostly hydro. Takes alot of habitat damage to build all the infrastructure when you build down here in the bush. Makes heaps more sense putting solar panels in the desert and they seem to have less cons than windmills even if they take up more sufrace area.
FYI Megaprojects, the record for the world's largest Trivia Contest is currently held by the small city of Stevens Point Wisconsin. Hosted by the campus radio station at UWSP and created by the Great and Powerful Oz and Eck.
I hope this continues it really is something that I feel my country should strive towards
Australia should be the largest clean energy exporter in the southern hemisphere. its the perfect economic goal for Australia to strive for. now they just have to make Darwin not an awful place to live. I wouldn't move there.
That's a long extension cord!
The one thing that kept crossing my mind when thinking of the undersea cable was how much power loss there could be with that long of a cable system. I realize there is probably some engineers working on ways to minimize the losses, but there still has to be a pretty significant loss.
YES EXACTLY!!! The power loss would be enormous over such a vast distance.
Be honest not that much around 15% is an educated guess vs green hydrogen round trip loss of at least 30% even using more advance but not yet industrial scaled reverse fuel cell technology.
The problem is that HVDC undersea vs overhead is not the same and HVDC under sea have a lot less transmission capacity vs overhead and there is earthquakes issues as well.
It's less than conventional transmission lines. It was said to operate at 800KV DC so it suffers no parasitic capacitance losses unlike conventional HVAC I believe the net losses would be as already stated around 15%. The problem with ultra high voltage DC transmission is that the infrastructure at each end is orders of magnitude more expensive to set-up which is why it's only used for high capacity backbone infrastructure. It would make more sense sending that power to the eastern Seaboard grid as the distance west is so large that the solar plant would produce power after all the solar in the east stopped making power. Having an east west link would also work in reverse with eastern solar coming online before the west allowing solar energy from the east to power the west too.
Connecting all the states in territories makes the most sense as it ads resiliency and reduces the storage needed for the whole system to work.
Real Engineering has a video about how Solar Power in Africa can never supply Europe because of the Distance involved. Singapore's a long way from Darwin.
I thought that.
Also Australia ship tonnes of UNPROCESSED raw minerals out of Darwin like some in third world country, then ships in processed items like batteries back.
Masses of cheap electric could allow processing and manufacturing factories to increase the value off Thier exports.
Might be better to use it to supply the East Australian coast during the evening, while the Northern Territory still has sunlight.
I understand that Sun Cable is, and always really has been, an Australian led concern proposed some time ago by Mike Cannon-Brookes... Not sure why this article presents it as being Singapore led?
It might seem strange that the solar panel capacity is 20GW while there is 6.4GW planned for Darwin and 2.2GW planned for Singapore which only adds up to 8.6GW.
This is resolved in two ways. First, as mentioned in the video, the project was originally planning to have 10GW of generation. Second, the excess generation allows the panels to recharge the batteries during the day for use at night.
There is also probably some excess capacity intended to be used as energy demand increases.
I hope this project is successful so that there can be more like it. Imagine the Northern Territory sending clean energy to the other states and capital cities. There's so much space available for solar panels in the Northern Territory and no real upper cap to energy demands. Imagine how many energy intensive applications would be enabled by more of these huge scale solar farms.
He said a 3GW 800km powerline to Darwin, and then a 2.2 GW subsea powerline from there. 20 GW of production would be mad under these conditions. 30 GWh storage for a 3 GW powerline on the other hand could deliver base load year round. He said that originally only 10 GW production were planned, so the rest of the numbers are probably not updated.
0:07 - RIP ☹️
Gentle giant of the skies ✈
Got the right plane in shot this time
This project makes a lot of sense to power AU, though broken out into multiple solar farms closer to where power is consumed but still in the regions with the most sunlight.
Grid Storage has come a long way, you don't need to use expensive Li-Ion batteries for this and still get great efficiency.
AU is one of the few countries that could go 100% solar.
Yeah we won't be going full solar, our solar farm in Victoria only produces power from 3pm til 6pm and even when it is active it only produces around 0.7%.
Individual house units for each house are good but u need a storage battery to cover u for night or bad weather.
But if it's overcast or raining which in Victoria during winter this happens for 6-7 months so solar in Vic is quite useless.
If people were serious about clean, cheap reliable energy then they'd be looking at nuclear and or traveling wave reactors or similar.
Wind n solar is 1. Very unreliable 2. Take up 1000s of acres of land, it's not really green when u clearcut idk 3-500 acres of land to build the farms is it?
A traveling wave reactor takes up a regular size block and can power Victoria for 10 yrs on 1 load of depleted uranium (nuclear waste) and there's enough of it stored to power the word for 1000 yrs lol
Crazy right yet we're being led to believe that solar and windmills are a good idea...
Seems a better project for hv dc cables to the other australian coastal cities in the west. Just supplying Indonesia would be enough considering its new capital move and its massive population.
Other Australian states and Indonesia can have more local sources.. Singapore lacks space.
And the cable under water is naturally cooled, which is an issue with surface cables in Australia
Today’s video is brought to you by SunCable Industries, More on them in a bit.
im wondering if putting down that much dark solarpanels over a light colored desert ,if that would not raise the temp around the area and what would that do to the wildlife and nature in that area
I knew a lot about this project, but I had no idea how profitable it was going to be , insane.
"potentially" be. I've done projections for projects before. Basically, if you're not willing to make beyond idiotic assumptions, they will fire you and find someone who will. A lot of selling projects from a financial standpoint is over promise, and pray you can hit it. But hope you're gone before everything goes to crap.
@@Tential1 "if you're not willing to make beyond idiotic assumptions, they will fire you and find someone who will"... this makes sense now why no one in the government gets fired and their projects never seem to make budget. No, I'm sure our nuclear subs project wont exceed 368B...
I'll give you a fun example. Portfolio insurance. Was designed to protect you against stock market losses. Sounds great. Until everyone tried to use it at once. Then, it broke. Financial numbers are literal crystal ball witch craft. Unless you physically have the money in hand, and even then, always be skeptical.
Another way of thinking about it, Elon musk said he wanted to buy Twitter and instantly found another 30B to make the offer. You can look this up, we call it "dry powder". There's 2 trillion usd waiting to be invested. So if a deal is remotely good, it gets funded. Don't believe the hype for these clean energy projects. There's a reason no one does them without government backing. The numbers rarely work without subsidies. It's always some bs. Once you dig into the numbers they rarely work. It's a grift. Clean energy investment funds are almost always the grimiest grifts. At least normally, you make money for your investors. Clean energy funds usually just grift money through elaborate means.
100% loss and dead in the water last I heard.
Would make me a proud Australian to see this come to life.
Would make me buy a gas mask. Don't wanna be downwind and unprotected when a bushfire rips through that.
All the fancy words aside, Singapore prides itself on its independence, which is why the power line goes right past indonesia, and they really should get singapore to get involved before too long. Maybe in a contract to buy all the power from specific panels, or some specific contract.
This is not far from me, it is mind blowing to look at in person. The Panel arrays are acres and acres of panels.
incredible
China and the usa to australia: first time?
2025 battle ground
Should serve as an example to other countries that self reliance on energy needs is a good strategic buffer against oil and LNG shortages.
This cable goes nowhere near the world southern ocean (reference 6 miins in video), it is a great project for for clean environmentally friendly electricity from Australia to needy islands in the north,a great idea ✌️♥️🇬🇧
You're ret4rded. There is NOTHING environmentally friendly in solar panels. Look into how they are made.
Even if they only went half way to Jakarta, a city of 10 million people, that would make a huge difference. Rather than trying to do it all as one big chunk, if they did it piecewise they could work within their existing budget and still rank in tons of cash.
I'm pretty sure this project was never designed to make money, it was supposed to extract money from investors and then collapse.
Yes, or to Indonesia's new capital that's in planning now. Ideal opportunity.
Sorry to say as an Australian, I felt that there are problems included
1. Just check how problematic is the Basslink.
2. Earthquake
3. Under water HVDC and Overhead HVDC have different capacity. I meant can only run lower Current.
4. The infrastructure in Australia is actually HVDC to connect Perth and South Australia then strengthen the South Australia to NSW grid is way more important than a link t9 Singapore for the purpose of Green Energy, a normal consumption ie peaks are morning hours before work and early night to cook there are +~3 considering different day night saving which is probably close to perfect (length of cable vs where the sun and moon is if we can have under water tidal plants).
You see in the early night peak sun in Perth still shining there are little needs for a battery as the energy pump to the east, and in the early morning peak sydney already 9am and can pump the energy west.
Wind on the other hand is a bit tricky.
My non scientific best case is that intra australia HVDC have a 15% net loss vs less then 10% over lion, but it is environmentally friendly since there only need a couple of rare earths to make the transformer then is aluminium copper rubber and steel to make a cable, vs batteries as lion needed, the initial big battery in South Australia can hold 15 mins of South Australian consumption, that that is at least 3 time less than NSW, so imagine with the driest Oceanic climate, pump hydro is difficult but of course there are ocean pump hydro but at what environmental cost? A intra Australian grid can save 30% of all batteries needs in Australia with HVDC is the equipment, cables can last 50 years if things went well and it is overhead without the undersea downgrade of max volts. You tell me which is better for the planet.
Australia in itself is 25m+ ppl Singapore is only 5m+ ppl my friend that is 4 times more ppl and 4 * 0.3 = 1.2 my friend 20% more efficient plus a much shorter and naturally more volt below and above sea cables with much less risk of earthquakes ie the Pacific Ring of Fire google this if you don’t know.
Why sun cables?
This is a great idea. It is amazing what we can be capable of. 😊
would be a great idea if it was for Australia :) yet here we are because we got sold the lie of privatising power would reduce prices... lol
I don't know where your getting your info from but there is no oil in the NT and the gas reserves are off shore in the Timor sea. Actually closer to East Timor than Australia but we managed to steal it from them by bugging their embassy during contract negotiations.
I think this is a great idea for Australia to own and operate, then rent out the power not the other way around feels like another "Australia gets left out idea"
guaranteed Australians wont benefit from this. A few politicians will though.
yep basically the same a sour coal mine and iron ore mines and gold mines, they should all be nationalized, government owned and then wed all be sitting on huge stockpiles of stuff instead of selling it to the highest bidder for them to make literal billions on.
That's a very inspiring project for the future, no Doubt about it
But what I don't get is why they opted to export the energy instead of using it for Australia themselves and later when all the bugs are ironed down and the technology is Mature try to export?
What advantages does building a big solar plant have over building small locally (I.e build in qld not nt)
This is the closest space to Singapore for large solar.
Their is not really a large amount of new tech here to export
iswitch, which is based in Singapore, has pulled out as a customer for the scheme, which is a serious blow. The current 4 solar farms are having major difficulties in supplying power to Darwin. The cost of the solar power to Darwin would result in increased costs to users in Darwin.
So how many Flux capacitors will it run?
Sounds like they're going to need a small town of employees to clean all those solar panels.
robotics already takes care of that stuff.
The problem in Australia is both the major parties are owned by the fossil fuel industry.
I wonder how often the solar panels will need the dust washed off in order to be efficient?
I am sure a few people with feather dusters can come along every few weeks to sort the problem.
The region is dusty AF, could generate jobs for dusters though.
Maybe we should go back a hundred years when there was a saying, ‘the sun never sets on the British empire’. There are similar deserts in Africa, Arabia, Mongolia, ‘stans and the United States.
Have to admit, the undersea cable seems crazy;
- beam that good stuff up through the atmosphere, or
- process things (reforming to hydrogen?) there, on site, and transfer the output instead
It's awesome to see the infrastructure potential in Australia, while sad to see the poor decision making in the undersea cable.. but maybe that's the only way they could get it off the ground originally?
One of the design challenges would be to build these 'solar farms' in ways that increase the habitat for a variety of native species. The installations wouldn't take up a large percentage of the area discussed, but the more that 'every species' can benefit the better - and sometimes a tiny benefit can begat significant benefits for quite a few species. (There is bound to be some way to arrange for the shade the panels would cause to make survival easier for several species. Among other things.)
The condensation of moisture on the panels at night will add water to the desert. Granted it’ll only be a small amount of water, but it will change the immediate area around the solar farms.
@@rmar127 growing grass would help keep the dust off the panels.
@Ozzie climate refo An engineering/design problem....
@Ozzie climate refo I’m just talking about passive condensation. As the panels cool each evening, they will reach the dew point sooner than the ground. Therefore, moisture will collect on the surface and trickle to the bottom before dripping on the ground. As I said, it’s not a huge amount but will introduce moisture to the area immediately below the panels.
What species in outback Australia. the ants or the scorpions because nothing else really survives out there lol.
For people saying it’s expensive, we got a 3GW nuclear plant for £33bn ($42bn) Vs this 20GW + battery + cable for £17bn
Even if this project got going, one cat 3 or 4 cyclone and it’s all over.
The area proposed is frequently affected by tropical cyclones, just as northern WA is this week with a cat4 cyclone crossing the coast and moving inland. There will be a colossal amount of water from it, just as they do crossing the NT coast.
The proposed location of the solar farm is between Elliot and Tennant Creek ( the final site has not been selected) 600 -750 Kilometres south of Darwin, Something like 400 Kilometres from the nearest coastline so out of the cyclonic winds. It may get rain but not the wind
@@richardwilliams5796 the cyclone crossing tomorrow will deliver destructive winds right through to Alice Springs on Saturday.
@@richardwilliams5796 as an example the system itself is around 800km wide and remains at cyclone intensity well inland around 600-1000km. czcams.com/video/7Vq_at0_8qQ/video.html
@@FuManchu5ltr Really that does not sound accurate, cyclones lose power quickly after land fall. Who is saying this. ?
@@raclark2730 are you serious? The link shows who. It also shows all the info relating to conditions yesterday. Current warning shows a Cat2 system 1000kms inland as far as Kiwirrkurra. That is Australian Bureau Of Meteorology as in the link previously show.
This will industrialise the North of OZ. Aluminium smelters for starters as there are two of the world's biggest bauxite mines up that way.
Then you have iron ore to be turned into steel.
It is going ahead, and contracts for the electricity have been signed recently.
I hope they put the PV panels up high enough so cattle can still graze underneath. Desalination would make farming possible.
The line to Singapore may not happen but the energy production will.
It is far from the ocean so desalination still requires a lot of power for pumping
I don't think you grasp how far inland this is lol desalination is NOT possible! Cattle can graze fine on desert grasses - and get water via The Great Artesian Basin, that's right below it & holds 5 times the water all the great lakes do. We maintain it as a renewable resourse though, so cattle drinking water only, not land irrigation with it! Cattle can wee out the water for ground irrigation
"This will industrialise the North of OZ"
The number of times this has been tried...
The sheep farms, cotton fields, this nonsense "Then you have iron ore to be turned into steel."
If it is dgoing to work, why didn't it work last time?
"I hope they put the PV panels up high enough so cattle can still graze underneath"
1. That's gonna be really expensive. There are cyclone level winds every few years, the further north you go, the worse it is. So they would have to have their mountings cemented into the ground.
2. Trees. They are a great way to feed cattle when the grass dries out. Panels=no trees.
@@SoMuchFacepalm
1)they are going south to avoid the monsoon. So the cyclones will not be as bad.
2)panels provide shade and put the rains onto a small patch for grass to grow.
@@catprog "1)they are going south to avoid the monsoon. So the cyclones will not be as bad."
The cyclones are on the coast. Cyclone level winds happen as far south as Alice Springs (where I live). They've done a lot of damage this year.
''2)panels provide shade and put the rains onto a small patch for grass to grow.''
So? Shade isn't good for plants, it won't stop evaporation, if the grass only grows in small patches, then you get lots of bare dirt that will give you lots of dust.
It was and is a fairly tale
Memory fails me but didn't a plan like this in North Africa fall though. How is this better?
Consider all the wasted roof space in the sunny countries in the world. How many acres of solar panels could be installed on factories, warehouses, hangers and shopping centres; places that draw almost constantly on the power grid, to reduce fuel use?
Military bases especially could do so to reduce the security threat of needing an external power source. A lower government power bill could be used elsewhere on other infrastructure and people needs.
There are malls and companies, and even Arizona State University, who has a massive parking lot with solar panels functioning as "covered parking" and generating power for the business, etc.
Australia also has the most rooftop solar per capita in the world.
bro its like 80% of houses in the outback of Australia has 2-20 panels
like the last time i lived in a house without them was 2005
How do you insulate high kilovoltage wires adequately? Power transmission lines in the air are separated by many feet. And the transmission losses over such distances?
would be high voltage DC in one cable only
Transmission losses might be as high as 30%. Still much more efficient than using the electricity to make green hydrogen and exporting that.
Long underwater lines are DC, so you don't waste energy by stray radio emissions (simplifying a lot). Also, with DC, you can use a single cable, using the ground for return. Of course increasing voltage in DC is complicated (expensive) but it is worth if the line is so long.
@@markotrieste Thanks. And then you have to reduce it on the other end. My grandmother lived in an apartment in Manhattan through the 1970's that had DC! I've often wondered if the building ever got converted.
Do u think indonesia will allow such cables in Indonesia territory?
If Indonesia gets some of the power, why not?
Remember they are Singapore’s largest supplier of LNG, would they want to help a competitor?
Wouldn't you lose most of the energy if you transeferred it that far? Especially in conductive salt water, the current in the wire would induce a current in the water right? Sounds like a vaporware project.
Anyone know when PV panels will be recyclable?
They built a crushing circuit that recycling the components of panels to get raw material back
@@jeffreystorer4966 They?
I love Simon......BUT.... I dare you to show up in "Trivia Night" somewhere. Or even American Jeperody.
can you do a vid on the new world's largest plane??
Not sure how the dust situation is in the Northern Territory, this is the issue with proposed solar farms in the Sahara. Apparently sand storms reduce output by 60% and no water to clean the panels.
Its not the same level as sahara
Nt has 2 seasons, dry season then wet season (monsoon season) .. they will wash themselves every 6 months for 6 months straight... 😂 .. its allready been cancelled in january the company went into administration... they were never building this..
Dust is not so much a problem, plenty of vegetation.
The video showed Australia's "deserts". We don't have moving sand deserts in the vast majority of our deserts here, we have enough desert grasses & other plants to keep the ground stable. There is still sometimes dust storms during droughts, but farmers use some of the most inovative systems in the world to reduce dust & preserve top soil here. "Pasture cropping" is a good example of a technique invented in Australia & then tested by the CSIRO, before information on it being shared with all farmers (technique involves keeping native, seasonal grasses in place & planting a crop into them, so that if no rain falls, the native grasses are still alive & able to later regrow & meanwhile their roots prevent the erosion that normally goes with preparing a field for a crop)
So all round, dust here is MUCH less of a problem than places like the Sahara
@@mehere8038 "farmers use some of the most inovative systems in the world to reduce dust & preserve top soil here. "Pasture cropping" is a good example of a technique invented in Australia & then tested by the CSIRO, before information on it being shared with all farmers"
And a grand total of NONE of this is happening in the completely empty desert where this is meant to be built.
I love how Dublin got a rep😂❤❤
Sharks and other sea animals depending on electromagnetic field to hunt and navigate must be ecstatic about the prospect of huge cable messing up with their way of life.
If this project does get off the ground that would probably set off a response in the US. As the
south western US has places that get almost as much sunshine year round consistently and has large population centers that need more power. Especially with the problems with the Colorado river and the Hover dam power generation. Also having the US invest into the concept makes the possibility of reducing cost and increase profitability of such projects easier in the future.
Replacing the power of the Hoover dam and adding another dam downstream to turn it into storage facility could solve the water problem.
Run at night, the pump the water back into the Hoover dam in the day using solar power.
Zero water loss (except evaporation)
I think if Indonesia wants to invest in Australian solar to supplement their energy supplies then that's cool, seems logical, but the Australian government should build and own the solar farms, by all means we can have a deal with Indonesia, they can invest in the project and we can build extra capacity for export, and especially if they pay for the cable then I'm sure we could offer a very low rate on the energy
It seems every year the Indonesians get financial AID from Australia.
doesn't Australia already have a solor farm running at a loss because dodgy?? pretty sure they sued the owner for like 2 billion in 2021
No Messmer Plan yet Simon?
2.2 Gigawats!!! Dear Scott!!!
14:32 - This part needs more nuance. In reality, Australia is already majority renewables generation from around 8am to 6pm. This is mainly powered by residental rooftop solar feed-in into the grid and is by far the cheapest generation wise. The problem is **we can't build solar farms or have rooftop solar installs fast enough** and that industrial, likely sodium-ion battery storage hasn’t caught up thus why coal is still used.
The states of Western Australia and South Australia have the highest rooftop solar penetration per 100,000 homes in the world and *everywhere* in Australia, even Tasmania, has more solar irradiation than Central and Western Europe.
It really is the Australian miracle.
Another issue with using the Sun Cable for domestic use is because Darwin and the Northern Territory are very far away from the main population centres on the east coast of Australia, the new transmission lines and thus cost of them would negate any cost saving vs particularly rooftop solar or more localised solar farms.
Our government still PRODUCES tons of fossil fuel here, whether they're actually used here or not is just a technicality - it's still an enormous production of carbon dioxide and pollution our country is responsible for. A new oil-drilling rig has just opened up up in WA waters. Furthermore, there are other options to sodium-ion batteries but even they have been shown to be very effective already (although not ideal).
I really haven't checked for a few years, but the last time I read up on the state of SA's power grid, it was so badly broken, roof solar panels had real trouble being used by the grid, leaving tons of people to pay much higher electrical bills. I think there's been some improvement but we're still getting blackouts when we shouldn't be. Other states might not be as bad though.
@@13minutestomidnight SA's issue is due to the transmission that the blue team privatised. SA has the highest transmission costs out of any state in Australia.
@@ChineseKiwi Uh, nope. I don’t think that was it.
@@13minutestomidnight it literally is. Transmission costs are the biggest part of your electricity bill.
What other method is there to send electricity that far across the water than with an underwater cable? Trying to put overhead lines over those segments of water would be really difficult to do, and more expensive.
Forrest wants to build electrolysers and export green hydrogen. It is very inefficient to do so and cannot deliver the same quantities of energy as an underground cable can due to this inefficiency. It is more flexible, though, as a liquid hydrogen transport vessel can export to anywhere that has a port with handling capabilities. It is also potentially more secure, as a cable can be damaged more easily than a shipping terminal and is harder to repair.
@@SocialDownclimber I hope humanity and politicians will quickly realize that we do need green hydrogen, but not for energy production, storage or transportation. We need it to decarbonize ammonia production, then steel production, and then maybe some e-fuels for aviation and shipping. But, as of 2023, any proposal to use hydrogen instead of electrons in a wire (or in a battery), is a scam in favor of the fossil industry.
Wow! That's cheaper than Hinkley Point C!
Europe needs some of these in the maghreb
Aren't they also going to need to build a factory to make the high voltage subsea cable? A 4,200km multi-gigawatt submarine cable sounds like a pretty specialized item - I know that high voltage cables are a growth area in the new economy but how much of it being made is submarine?
Yes, the UK is planning a similar project for Northern Afrika. A 4000km undersea cable order would be multiple years of world production. So they are building a factory for the cable first, if the project gets financing in order.
SWER (or SWSR?) ???
6:41 even longer than the undersea internet cables across the Atlantic?
14:38 Are you sure about that Simon.
I hope bearded dragons like basking on solar pannels.
I lived in a town with a guaranteed 365 days a year of sunshine, with the odd scattered cloud. Basically those quarter days of leap years would add up to the rain falling for a week every 20 years or so. Sited in the rain shadow of a mountain range, so no rain from the plains, and too far for the rising cloud rain. The joke was that rainfall could vary drastically between neighbours, with the one getting 1mm of rain, and the rain gauge 20m away at the neighbour getting none, and the same for the other side neighbour as well. We said the frogs and fish learned to swim by correspondence course, though the golf course was well watered, getting it's water exclusively from the town sewage plant.
Darwin is almost just a mining colony in terms of population
btw south Australia could use the energy
What was your man doing wandering around with a spirit level 🤣
This is an ingenious way to get around carbon regulations. Asia wont ever stop burning fossil fuels. Just buy power from them.
Sorry? This is a plan to sell them energy, not to buy it.
It's more that they can't right now, rather than won't.
Would agree with the few comments on the huge power losses associated with the cable going under water clear to Singapore. It seems to me that this project would make more sense for Australia's own use. Just getting the transmission lines into the air and away from the water and earth would cut your losses significantly, especially with high voltage DC current. Large scale semi-conductors could efficiently convert the DC to AC current once the power reached its destinations. Also, a solar boiling water or another Liguid in a closed loop can more efficiently generate electric power than solar cells at a much lower capitol costs or initial investment. Besides, solar cell manufacturing is much more polluting and power hungry than manufacturing a solar boiling fluid plant too. Then there has to be power storage whether you use solar cells a solar concentrating plant to boil a working fluid. Not such a dumb concept but I think their method & use of electric power generation and transport to market needs some more thought.
The proposal included a 800KVDC cable with loses around 15% which would be similar loses as a domestic UHVDC transmission line except you might have problems with the land owners across the route.
Also solar thermal plants are way more expensive per KW of generation than PV and it's been that way for about a decade. Solar thermal does have real advantages and will likely make a comeback due to energy storage potential but it is simply a more expensive form of generation at the moment.
For people who don't get how big 35 of those farms would be... 7 of them is bigger than New York City. 14 of them are bigger than London. Imagine 5 of NYC, just solar panels. That's a lot. And that's but a tiny part of one area of one state. Now imagine if we had not 35, but 3,500 of them. 1% of the Northern Territory. That's a theoretical 70 TERRAwatts. Now if Australia and the rest of the world have roughly equal energy consumption per person, that's enough power for Australia, China, GB, USA, Canada, Russia, Japan, and the EU. If my quick calculations are correct. From merely 1% of 1 area in 1 state. That's nearly a quarter of the world's population powered during daytime.
The fundamental issue here is the voltage drop over the long distance transmission cables, until cost efficient super conductors can be developed the whole idea is pie in the sky.
It's not. High voltage DC has a loss of 1% over 1000km, with conversion back to AC you would get a loss of around 10%.
makes me wonder.... what has become of Desertec?
I think one of the main challenges with this is no country wants to be dependent on another for their electricity, imagine the power Australia would have over Indonesia of they were responsible for supplying lets say 60% of their electricity.
Australia supplies nearly all of Asia with LNG and coal now as is world number 1 or 2 with both of those resources.
China banned Australian coal during disputes and had power blackouts and factories closing down.
Hey we did so in Europe with Russian gas, it worked... oh wait 😂
@@markotrieste Gas is one thing, electricity is another, I mean gas is still bad but losing your electricity is more "instant', countries usually have a stockpile of gas in the event of a cut off but not so with electricity, but I am aware that countries do trade electricity in Europe, so, I guess maybe if they really really want to trust us...
@@legallyfree2955 This system has batteries at both ends from my understanding, so that helps a little & they are also talking no more than 20% of power needs to any country, which should be manageable & Australia is very stable, that's a lot of why this is viable, long history of stable government & stable decisions, no risk there. There is a risk with an underwater cable though, especially if it goes through multiple countries to get to you. Tonga's biggest problem after the volcano was their undersea cable was cut by it, so they really struggled to communicate what was happening & what they needed. Earthquakes & volcanos in this area could easily do the same thing, as could submarines of adversities
@@mehere8038 I am glad someone mentioned the geological instability of the ocean floor where Sun Cable would be laid. This is to me, the number one concern not being talked about and not really mentioned by Simon in the video. As for batteries they won't help firm much loss of power at night - impossible. Other forms of backup would be required.
Australia does not have Provinces, we have States & Territories (There's a clue in the name "Northern Territory").
It looks to me the investors forgot to take advantage of one of the biggest advantage of renewables: the scalability. If they truly believed in it, the've should have started small, with a small "proof of concept" plant in the desert, the power line to Darwin, and some end use for that energy. Once proven, they've should have expanded the scope, and once the energy available was above a certain threshold, decide whether to build the cable or an electrolyzer.
why would they do that when they have 0 buyers lol
7.3 million Shaqs would be a good entry into the 'anything but metric' meme
They should've just phased this plan...
Build a solar plant big enough to service Darwin, future proof the cable for more energy and go from there.
Having the jobs for the solar panel construction, installation and maintenance would've kept the project going and government invested...
Then the path to export is shorter and simpler - since it's just 'do more of the same' - more panels, more cables...
Why not at least power Darwin with solar? Plus crossing some of the most heavily shipped, geologically active and deepest waters between both ends.
Because Australia is the best of the nations !
Power loss over distance makes this whole idea unlikely
Huge undersea power cables are a technological challenge even in theory let alone actually on the seafloor over distances like this would involve.
My impression is that this aspirational project was never feasible even if possible. As noted by others already, it is essentially dead in the water. Pun intended
You didn’t mention HVDC or 5B
PLEASE make it a pitch to our Aussie governement...they don't listen to us and we need this 😞