Singapore is a small island in need of pure assets and depends on imports for nearly all the pieces together with water and power. About 2,600 miles away is Australia, wealthy in pure assets and open area. Now, a billionaire tech founder needs to make use of a few of Australia’s unused land mass to offer Singapore entry to an enormous photo voltaic farm.
On Wednesday, the Australian authorities cleared the primary section of SunCable’s AAPowerlink undertaking, which hopes to ship power from an enormous photo voltaic farm in Australia’s north to Singapore, through a 2,600-mile underwater cable. To place that size in context, the $13.5 billion undertaking would require a cable that might cowl virtually the total east-west size of the continental U.S.
Tanya Plibersek, Australia’s setting minister, mentioned SunCable’s undertaking would meet rising demand for renewable power, each domestically and internationally. “It will be the largest solar precinct in the world—and heralds Australia as the world leader in green energy,” she mentioned.
SunCable hopes that the 12,000 hectare photo voltaic farm and battery storage facility will ship as much as 6 gigawatts of power 24/7 to Singapore and the Australian metropolis of Darwin.
The corporate says a ultimate funding choice will are available 2027, and electrical energy provide will start within the early 2030s.
SunCable will nonetheless want approval from each Singapore and Indonesia to hold out the undertaking.
A turnaround for SunCable
Australia’s approval, which SunCable referred to as a “vote of confidence,” is a turnaround for the corporate.
The undertaking was first backed by two billionaires, iron-ore magnate Andrew Forrest and Atlassian cofounder Mike Cannon-Brookes. However the two disagreed in regards to the undertaking’s viability and future path, and SunCable went into voluntary administration in January 2023.
Cannon-Brookes beat Forrest for management of the corporate; Grok Ventures, Cannon-Brookes’s non-public funding firm, acquired SunCable in September 2023.
On the time, Cannon-Brookes referred to as SunCable a “world-changing project” and argued that resource-rich Australia wanted to finish its reliance on coal. The tech billionaire is a local weather change activist, an investor in renewable power initiatives, and proprietor of a inexperienced philanthropic fund.
Cannon-Brookes, by way of Grok Ventures, owns an 11.3% stake in AGL Vitality, making him the highest shareholder in Australia’s largest power firm. He efficiently lobbied towards AGL’s plans to separate into separate retail and energy era corporations, which might have allowed the ability agency’s coal crops to maintain working into the 2040s.