Huge Australia To Singapore, Clean Energy Cable, Gets Green Light.

The world's biggest renewable energy and transmission project has received vital approval from government officials.

The Australia Asia Power Link project would send Australian solar power to Singapore via 4,300-kilometre-long undersea cables. SunCable is leading the AAPowerLink project, which would start by constructing a mammoth solar farm in Australia's Northern Territory to transmit around-the-clock clean power to Darwin and export reliable, cost-competitive renewable energy to Singapore.

The principal environmental approval recently obtained from the Northern Territory government rubber stamps the building of a solar farm at Powell Creek with a clean energy generation capacity of up to 10 gigawatts plus utility-scale onsite storage. It also greenlights an 800 km/500-mile overhead transmission line between the solar precinct and Murrumujuk near Darwin.

A converter facility would convert electricity from high-voltage direct current to high-voltage alternating current to supply Darwin. The setup is expected to supply up to 4GW of 24/7 green electricity to green industrial customers. This would be rolled out over two stages, the first delivering 900 megawatts and the second adding 3 gigawatts.

The project aims to convert another 1.75 GW of power from AC to DC and send it through 4300 km of sub-sea cabling to Singapore. The environmental approval would allow the company to lay a cable from Darwin converter station past the end of Australian territorial waters and up to the Indonesian border.

The company, acquired by billionaire Mike Cannon Brookes last year after a bidding war with former project partner Andrew Forrest, still has several hurdles to jump before the AAPowerLink project gets moving. These include negotiating land use with local owners, nailing agreements with other bodies along the route, and even financing the ambitious project. "Sun Cable is delighted to receive environmental approval from the Northern Territory government to proceed with our flagship Australia Asia Power Link Project said company MD Cameron Garnsworthy. "This approval allows us to progress the development, commercial and engineering activities required to advance the project to the Final Investment Decision targeted in 2027."

If all dominoes line up ideally, the first clean electricity supply is estimated to start in the early 2030s. An overview graphic on the project page shows that the eventual end game for the Powell Creek development appears to be the generation of up to 20 GW of peak solar power and some 36-42 GWh of battery storage on site.

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