10 may
Australia and Singapore will jointly launch a megaproject for the transportation of "clean" energy in 2024, the portal reports Neftegaz.ru with reference to the press service of the Global Energy Association. Sun Cable intends to implement a project to transport solar energy from Australia to Singapore. The project should provide 15% of Singapore's electricity needs. The details of the project were disclosed in the report on the potential environmental impact. It was presented to the industry regulator of the Northern Territory at the end of April. A solar power plant with a capacity of 17-20 GW will be commissioned in this Australian state. The station will be integrated with an energy storage system with a capacity of 36 to 42 GWh of electricity. A complex of solar panels and storage batteries with an area of 12 thousand hectares will be located in Barkley County (part of the Northern Territory). Electricity via an 800-kilometer power line with a capacity of 6.4 GW will be transmitted to the converter site in the settlement of Murrumujuk near Darwin on the Indian Ocean. 0.8 GW will be supplied from here to Australian consumers, the remaining 5.6 GW – to Singapore via 6 underwater cable systems with a length of 4.2 thousand km.
The complex is designed for 70 years of operation. During this time, a total of 480 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions will be saved, which is comparable to the annual emissions in South Africa (513.4 million tons, according to the World Bank).Sun Cable plans to complete the fundraising for the project in 2023. It is planned to start construction of generating capacities already in 2024. Due to the commissioning of the complex, it will be possible to implement the ideas of intercontinental transportation of electricity, which have gained popularity with the development of ultra-high voltage (HV) technologies.
One of the pioneers of such technologies was Japan. In 1999, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) built 2 SVN lines with a voltage of 1000 kV: one of them connected AES in the north of Japan with the metropolitan region in the south, the second connected the capital to a power plant on the Pacific coast.A major project in the field of SVN in 2018 was implemented by China. The Changji-Guquan line was built with a voltage of 1100 kV. It has a length of 3,324 km, and can transmit 100 million kWh of electricity every 8 hours and 20 minutes.
Such a solution will partially solve the problem of the imbalance between the energy–deficient West and the energy-deficient East of China," Ts Liang He, one of the co-authors of the second report "10 breakthrough ideas in the energy sector for the next 10 years", noted earlier in an interview with Global Energy.In his opinion, the SVN technology will expand the geography of the use of renewable energy, since countries where they produce a lot of renewable energy will be able to export it to those regions where alternative energy is not yet widespread (including due to adverse weather conditions).
Illustrative photo from open sources