Undersea plan to sell sunshine to Singapore back on track

AN AUSTRALIAN project to harvest sunlight from its deserts and export that energy to Singapore seems to have been given another lease of life. The idea is to ride on the plan of Singapore’s Energy Market Authority to import up to 4 GW of low-carbon electricity by 2035.

But Sun Cable, the company behind the solar farm and power export plan, went into voluntary administration earlier this year when one partner fell out over the scale of the undertaking. He was unconvinced that it could be done. The proposal seemed doomed. Now the firm has been wholly acquired by the other partner, one of the country’s richest men, billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes, who wants to push on with the project to deliver power via a 4,200 km undersea cable. He is quoted as saying: “It’s time to stretch our country’s ambition. We need to take big swings if we are going to be a renewable energy superpower. So swing we will.”

Certainly it will be ambitious. Technically, there should not be any real obstacle to such a long energy conduit. For example, when the Soviet-era Gazprom proposed piping gas to Germany in the early 1970s, that too was considered hugely audacious. Yet, until the outbreak of the Ukraine war, gas from the Urals powered German factories without major problems. Then there is the example of the 4,000 km pipeline that delivers Siberian gas to China.