back to article Atlassian CEO's bonkers scheme to pipe electricity from Australia to Singapore collapses

A plan backed by Atlassian co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes – aimed at providing 15 percent of Singapore's electricity needs using solar energy generated in Australia – has collapsed. The Australia-Asia PowerLink (AAPL) project envisioned installing 120km2 of solar panels capable of generating 3.2 gigawatts in Australia's Northern …

  1. deevee

    serves "loose canon" Brookes right.

    He should but out of things he has no clue about, he's destroyed AGL with his activism.

  2. bigtreeman

    rich dreamers

    If they had used the Tesla Wireless Power Transmission system,

    I would have believed they were for real,

    and not just rich, wanking dreamers.

    Shame on Infrastructure Australia for giving the business case a big tick.

    Pity they didn't run it by knowledgable engineers who would have given it a big fail.

    1. Lon24
      Trollface

      Re: rich dreamers

      No mate that isn't even vapourware. Why not use real vapourware? They are jolly good at carrying electricity according to a young B. Franklin.

      Have a jolly big pole in Darwin to charge up any passing cloud and lots of cabled kites in Singapore to discharge them. Added benefit of discouraging flying in the south east Asia unless you are a bit flash. Yep, I realise that would also require tinkering with the local weather systems but you need to think big and all the little problems will go away - at least until you have milked the gullible.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: rich dreamers

      Is this supposed to be poetry or something?

      1. Youngone

        Re: rich dreamers

        I wandered lonely as a cloud full of electricity...

  3. jgarbo
    Coat

    Sorry for stupid question...

    but can I see the feasibility study...?

    1. bazza Silver badge

      Re: Sorry for stupid question...

      Not mentioned is the losses such a cable would have. They would be truly terrible. You'd be fortunate to light a single bulb at the end of it, no matter what juice you'd put in at the start.

      As for the cable itself, it could be tapered. There'd be no point maintaining the initial diameter all the way along the 4000km; as the power is lost to resistance (am assuming DC, these undersea things are never AC), less copper is needed to carry what's left.

      1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

        Re: Sorry for stupid question...

        The North Sea link is 720km and its losses are priced at 3.4% - I'm going to presume that's pretty close to the measured loss.

        So a 4000km cable would have roughly 19% losses (assuming same construction and capacity, which it's not - NSL is 1.4GW, this was 3.2GW, but I'm back-of-the-enveloping here). Even at 20 or 25% loss, I believe SGs power mix is currently very dirty so there's an incentive to do this, as demonstrated by the fact they had so many firms signing up.

        Overall I'm a little sad to see this one go, and I'm not sure it was a bonkers as made out - you can get over most of the issue described, but I imagine plate tectonics would be the deal-breaker.

        1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
          Coat

          Re: Sorry for stupid question...

          but I imagine plate tectonics would be the deal-breaker.

          Maybe they could have used a curly cable like on a telephone handset?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Sorry for stupid question...

            Won't work, the sharks would just twiddle it with their fingers.

            1. Dave Schofield

              Re: Sorry for stupid question...

              >Won't work, the sharks would just twiddle it with their fingers.

              Is that while they are waiting for their lasers to recharge?

          2. Antipode77

            Re: Sorry for stupid question...

            The cable would need to be at least twice, maybe thrice as long.

        2. cadencep45

          Re: Sorry for stupid question...

          yo canna beat the law of physics

          1. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

            Re: Sorry for stupid question...

            If I remember rightly, AC power transmission losses are proportional to the resistance of the cable (obviously) and also inversely proportional to the voltage (which is why overhead transmission cables are high voltage), so it's not quite the case that a cable twice as long would lose twice as much power, as the voltage drop would mean a higher rate of loss. The way to counter this would be either to use higher voltages, and handle the issues that entails, which I believe are non-trivial.

            The alternative is to use some sort of HV-DC transmission, which this probably would have, but then you have to have inverters and step-down transformers to make the power usable, and these have their own costs and energy losses associated with them.

            As other posters have commented, it's almost certainly the difficulties in maintaining the integrity of the cables over this sort of distance, through a tectonically active zone, that would be the main problem.

            1. I could be a dog really Silver badge

              Re: Sorry for stupid question...

              Well sort of.

              For a DC link, the losses are I^2 * R where R is the resistance of the cable and I is the current. Double the voltage, you halve the current for the same power, and hence reduce the losses to 1/4. There is the obvious tradeoff between the lower losses at higher voltage, vs the difficulty of building and maintaining a very high voltage cable.

              Once you go AC then things get "quite a bit more complicated". I^2 R losses are still the same, but you also have to factor in the inductance and capacitance of the cable.

              But for a link like this, it would almost certainly be DC. A significant reason is that if you use AC then you have to synchronise the power systems at both ends, and keeping a synchronous distribution system stable gets harder as it gets bigger - for that reason, parts of the US grid uses DC links to provide a split between synchronous sections (as well as reducing losses on long links). If you did an AC-DC-AC conversion at one end to provide separation from synchronising requirements - then you might as well do AC-DC-long cable-DC-AC.

        3. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge
          Joke

          Re: Sorry for stupid question...

          Hang on, hang on!

          Isn't the Australian plate actually moving *northward* into Asia!

          Just think! It'll become *more* efficient over time!

        4. bazza Silver badge

          Re: Sorry for stupid question...

          Hmmm, well, there in lies the assumptions.

          A hard way to increase the capacity of a HVDC line is to increase the voltage. Trouble is, you end up need exotic insulators to prevent a breakdown. Assuming that improved insulators are not available, increased voltage is not an option; they're already using some pretty impressive insulators. So, it then comes down to the volume of copper.

          At approx twice the power to achieve the same % loss per 1000km requires twice the cross section area. And at 5.5 times the length, the overall increase in copper mass would have to be about 10 times NSL's, to get the same loss per 1000km, to achieve your approx 19% loss.

          However, assuming the NSL represents about the the maximum mass of copper that can be laid in a cable (ships are volume-limited), the copper cross section area of this one would have to be about 1/5th of NSL's to be able to get 4000km of cable on the ship. So the loss per 720km is more like 5.5x3.4=19%, and over 4000km the total loss would be about 59%.

          However, what actually matters is the overall diameter of the cable, and as the insulation thickness requirement has not dropped at all (same running voltage, so the same wall thickness of insulation is required), that's going to have quite a large impact on the volume of copper that can actually be housed on the ship. The limit comes when the ship cannot store 4000km of insulation of sufficient thickness insulation even if there is no copper wire inside it.

          So, either a lot less copper is put into the cable, or if the limit is reached the operating voltage has to be dropped to allow thinner insulation. As the semi-ideal situation already has losses of about 59%, any drop in operating voltage is going to have a bad impact on the total loss. If the voltage were halved, that'd double the current and quadruple the loss per unit distance. So now we could be looking at not 19% per 720km, but 76%, and over 4000km a loss of something like 99.96%.

          So yes, it would indeed light a light bulb, but not much else.

          Really, 4000km of HVDC cable achieving a sensible loss at 3.2GW is a stupendous undertaking. A ship able to lay 7,500 tons of cable is already a very big ship (the Cable Innovator - 14,000ton), I dread to think what it'd be to lay 4000km of competitive HVDC cable. There's also the question of can such a big ship actually get close enough to a shore for the cable to be landed?

          There's also the issue of, just where does all that copper come from? It's not cheap. I think that, realistically, to build a DC link that long they'd have to go fully exotic - some amazing insulator and extremely high voltages, or undersea superconducting cable. It's just too damned long to be sensible. Here in the UK the old CEGB did look at re-gridding the UK with DC superconductors, and even back then in the 1960s the savings in transmission loss looked like they'd pay for helium and exotic metals that go into metallic superconductors. The problem was that the cost of replacing literally all the plant of the entire grid was too high to contemplate.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Sorry for stupid question...

            The other obvious problem with offshoring the grid is that it doesn’t solve the distribution problem. Having power on the outskirts of the island doesn’t deliver it to data centres in east London.

            Bits are being offshored, mostly where there are specified requirements to move power across already constrained boundaries. A full ring however, is not an economic idea.

            Any kind of exotic materials made at scale is immediately irrelevant/never gonna happen territory. Superconductors sound good till you look at the running costs and reliability: you typically need three circuits for every two conventional to get the system uptime you want. Supercon is only any good where you have a short ranged and extremely dense power flow requirement.

            Insulation of the XLPE variety is good to about 750kV or thereabouts. Much beyond that is hitting the limits of the material and having useful service lifetimes. There’s no good alternative to copper conductor for long distances; with only graphene offering possibilities IF it can be made in bulk.

          2. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

            Re: Sorry for stupid question...

            To be fair, I don't think the full 4000km would need to be on the ship at once, you'd need a specialist vessel to lay the cable, but it could be supplied by supply ships, and connected as required. I'd be more worried about the weight of the dangling cable when they're over the deepest part of the ocean; if they're planning on going via the Banda Sea, that's about 7 km down.

            1. I could be a dog really Silver badge

              Re: Sorry for stupid question...

              Indeed.

              IIRC, for the first transatlantic cable attempt, two ships met in the middle, spliced the free ends of their cables, and set off in opposite directions.

              But in general, you could lay one section (whatever the ship can carry) and drop the end - you know pretty well where it is. You then sail off to the factory and refill the cable tanks. On return, you drop a grapple, pull up the free end, splice it onto the free end on the new batch, then carry on. So capacity of the cable laying ship should be a limitation - though obviously there would be a preference for minimising the number of splices done at sea.

      2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge
        Joke

        Re: Sorry for stupid question...

        Cable? Nah. Just send the electricity right through the water. It has a whole bunch of electrolytes in it...

        1. Slipoch

          Re: Sorry for stupid question...

          It's what water craves

      3. the spectacularly refined chap Silver badge

        Re: Sorry for stupid question...

        Current is the same at all points in a circuit without branches.

        If you want to criticise the plans of experts it's helpful if you understand primary school level science experiments, in this case that one with the two light bulbs in series.

        1. bazza Silver badge

          Re: Sorry for stupid question...

          Primary school experiments do not tell you much about the practicalities of building a 4,000km under sea high voltage DC transmission line. Nor does enthusiasm bring them into being, it seems...

      4. I could be a dog really Silver badge

        Re: Sorry for stupid question...

        No, you couldn't taper the cable, not for the reason you state.

        The power losses are primarily resistive losses along the cable - so over distance, the voltage reduces, but the current remains constant. In theory you could use less insulation at the load end - but then if you reduces the load (or even disconnected it as can happen with a fault or for maintenance), you'd lose the volt drop and the reduced insulation would have to cope with the full voltage.

        The losses due to leakage through the insulation (and which would reduce the current as you move downstream) are typically tiny.

  4. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

    Don't give up so easily

    Put the giant battery on a giant boat. I bet they didn't think of that one.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ok, but…

    What if it’s only daft because they were using the wrong sort of battery?

    What if you built the solar farm but then instead of building a giant lithium battery and a 4000km cable, you built a cable to the nearest abundant source of water instead then used the electricity and water to produce green hydrogen.

    Now you have your energy stored and can move it anywhere you like using good old fashion ships (although you might like to run them on green hydrogen).

    On arrival, said hydrogen can be converted back to electricity or used to power cars, trucks, planes etc directly.

    1. lglethal Silver badge

      Re: Ok, but…

      Nearest abundant source of water... In the Northern Territory? You're not too familiar with Australian geography are you?

      And what water there is, well, you'll be fighting the crocs for access. My money is on the crocs...

    2. Neil Barnes Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: Ok, but…

      Nah, they're not thinking this through: if you've got lots of sunlight energy at point A and you want that energy at point B, why all the wasteful conversion to electricity? Just use a big fat fibre optic cable...

      The one that glows in the dark --->

      1. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

        Re: Ok, but…

        "if you've got lots of sunlight energy at point A and you want that energy at point B"

        You could turn the planet so the sun aims at point B instead.

      2. Sceptic Tank Silver badge

        Re: Ok, but…

        Singapore and Austria are basically on the same spot on the globe. If the sun sets over the Western Dessert there won't be any light coming out of those fibre optic cables. Now electricity can be used all day long. Let me know if my plan is flawed.

    3. katrinab Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Re: Ok, but…

      What if instead you used the electricity to charge some giant batteries, and transported them by ship to Singapore?

      Yes, I know it sounds like a crazy idea, but no more crazy than trying to ship hydrogen long distances.

      1. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

        Re: Ok, but…

        What you need is a monorail...

        1. Sceptic Tank Silver badge

          Re: Ok, but…

          Or a hyperloop.

    4. Adam 1

      Re: Ok, but…

      You may be closer to the point of disagreement between Messrs Forrest and Cannon-Brookes than you know. One having significant alignment of investments in generating green hydrogen and the other believing this moonshot aspect being a core differentiator in securing funding (solar hydrogen projects are not exactly unheard of).

      There are other complexities in the manufacture, storage and transport of hydrogen so it isn't necessarily a silver bullet. There are also other benefits to having the extension cord (it doesn't have to always export power, depending on weather etc). It also makes sense when you can align peak producing times for solar with peak consumption time because of timezone differences minimising storage requirements. But all that is a beard stroking session for another day.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ok, but…

      Hydrogen and fuel cells or direct combustion is one option.

      Methane and heavier synthetic hydrocarbons are another. For land and air transportation, synthetic liquid fuels might make a lot of sense - we have a century of experience storing and transporting and using those. And natural gas for domestic and industrial purposes too. It would be a great intermediate step if we could continue doing that without having to dig more carbon out of the ground.

      There's a lot of work on ammonia internal combustion engines or fuel cells for shipping.

      Carbon capture and storage from conventional power plants gives us an important feedstock to help bootstrap processes involving hydrocarbons. Yes, that carbon will end up in the atmosphere BUT it's going though at least two use cycles beforehand - even more if CO2 is captured and shipped back from where the synthetic hydrocarbons are consumed for another run through the synthetic fuel cycle. It's still a win in terms of reduced carbon emissions, without having to prematurely retire and replace a whole lot of still-functional technology.

      1. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge
        Boffin

        Re: Ok, but…

        I'd much rather catch a lungful of methane in the case of an accident, than a lungful of ammonia. One is decidedly more fatal than the other.

  6. man_iii
    Pint

    Simple solutions

    Probably the number one reason lab results never make it to market in the exact same way they tested them.

    Like someone mentioned use the solar to make ammonia hydrogen store it ship it and use a smaller solar farm insite to release the hydrogen.

    Or just setup pumped storage since you have lots of land and might need water during dry season and test the limits capacity the system generates stores and handled. Then later figure out the buyer seller etc once it is actually functional.

    Small steps and all that.

  7. NeilPost

    As bonkers as this ?

    https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/04/government-chaos-delays-uk-sahara-energy-link

    1. blackcat Silver badge

      Re: As bonkers as this ?

      Another issue is that the locals don't want all their water being used to clean solar panels for someone else. A German company had the same idea a decade or so ago and it also flopped. Another factor being that all your generation infrastructure is on someone else's land.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bad idea, rather like Xlinks (Morocco-UK). The latter is even less justified than Singapores case given that we actually have land to put things on.

    It is difficult enough to look after a 100km cable. They are very, very expensive to build and make work reliably. Condition monitoring systems such as embedded fibre optic in the cable have a range of about 60km. Longer lengths obviously can’t be monitored that way. Copper wholesale prices have also more or less tripled in not very long, which ramps your price significantly.

    To say nothing of the fact that a copper cable of this length and capacity would represent a very large proportion of global copper production full stop, thus putting a dent in production of many other industries. Electronics, transformers, etc.

    Recycle? Well, no, recycled copper is inevitably contaminated with other metals somewhat, which buggers up your performance calculations. I’m more familiar with the AC calculations described in IEC60287 but most of the physics are the same.

    Singapores lack of land does somewhat justify doing something slightly odd; but there are other territories not nearly so far away that would surely make sense to work with? As for xlinks, why the hell would you pipe to the UK when you could go to Spain, France or especially northern Italy for a fraction of the cost (with the favourable market access that comes) I do not know.

    1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

      I had the same question re. Spain, which is very short of interconnects. As I understood it, the UK electricity market would generate more profit.

      1. blackcat Silver badge

        Spain has a lot of land, is further south so solar is more usable and also has a large % of nuclear, hydro and pumped storage for when it isn't sunny.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Yeah, this is why I listed Northern Italy as "my preference" - which has interconnection into many lucrative Central European markets and guaranteed demand.

        Spain the weakest of the three that I listed, but still vastly cheaper to connect than the UK even if you have to pay to install some extra interconnections over or around the Pyrenees. At least the onshore stuff can be done as an overhead line, which is sufficiently reliable for long distance. For examples, see the profitable, reliable, and very long distance DC OHL interconnects from British Columbia into the USA.

        As someone that has had the joy of having to asset manage the very long cables in the UK; there is no way in hell a 1000+km system will be reliable, or particularly maintainable. Besides the nonsense of building it in the first place.

        A cursory google of Western Link failures will pop up evidence of why long cables are unreliable. Very long ones are a terrible idea. If you're an investor looking at such projects, my advice is RUN AWAY.

        1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

          I now suspect you're the same AC I was talking to about a year ago the last time X-links came up. As you know what you're talking about, I have a question - why is the North Sea Link viable at 720km? Surely they will hit all the same issues at that length than you'd expect on 1000km or longer? I am naively assuming that all other things being equal, a cable twice as long will simply have twice as many issues. Not the case?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            More than like the same A/C. A/C for obvious reasons, as I'm employed in the sector and the list of cable engineers is even shorter.

            North sea is shallow, therefore considerably easier to work on the seabed using established practises for deep sea diving. As opposed to the east-central Atlantic, which is horrendous and often too deep unless using a submersible. Also has volcanic threats to the cables; going from Morocco to UK. Repair times in event of fault on Xlinks will be measured in multiple months to a year+. NSL; more accessible, so faults can be tackled on slightly better (though not good) time frames. $20bn investments suffering months of downtime tend to develop problems paying their loans.

            Cable length is still a major risk to NSL. It mitigated somewhat by having redundant cables and the "island" mid-way along route i.e. the odds of shutting everything off is much lower. The lower transfer requirements mean there is considerably less to go wrong.

            If it were me calling the shots, I wouldn't be doing NSL. (Far rather go into Northern Europe and overland).

            1. katrinab Silver badge
              Meh

              I'm not an electrical engineer, but surely it would be better to link into the grid in Southern Spain and push everything northwards from there, making the necessary upgrades to the grid as required?

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Yes, absolutely. But never let a PR coup trump common sense engineering on an international scale.

                1. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

                  Visibly visionary

                  Didn't you mean *always* let a PR coup trump common sense engineering... ?

  9. JHSyd

    Twisty Twiggy...

    Basically, Andrew Forrest wants to hijack the AAPL power output for his "Green Hydrogen" projects. Was he always planning to pull the rug out from under the original Singapore plan, or was he frightened off as the complexities became increasingly apparent? Your call.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Twisty Twiggy...

      Me thinks the Twiggmeister likes to see his name and image on the NEWS as much as possible.

      He’s the Aussie Musk.

  10. Ertimus

    Like all renewables its the unknowing armchair experts who know everything.

    1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

      Irony detector encountered infinite loop: restarting

  11. Nonymous Crowd Nerd

    It'll be built in the end.

    The battery, tbh, does sound a bit on the challenging side. 150MW - the size of the one built previously - is a lot less than 3GW. But there are stacks of interconnects working all over Europe which are very useful without the need for batteries.

    I wonder if Bevan Slattery might have been somewhat biased against the project.

  12. Martin Summers

    Genuine question, what happens when a high voltage power cable breaks in the middle of the ocean? Excuse me for perhaps being naïve and thinking there's a bit of toaster in the bath happening for any unfortunate creature in the immediate area? Or does it manage to shut off pretty darn quickly like an RCD would?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Good question. Depends somewhat on the nature of the fault and construction - let's assume it's a bipolar cable i.e. one bit of conductor going south and one going north to create a DC loop.

      Let's drag a ship's anchor through said cable.

      The loop is broken so obviously the current will fall. Control systems will intervene to open the relevant circuit breakers.

      Energy in the cable and pent-up capacitance between the inner and outer layers can still discharge contributing to an almighty bang, not one you want to be anywhere near; but also not a threat to anything beyond the immediate area of the break. The ship might have some issues if your HVDC decides to loop round up anchor rather than grounding (hence the outer layer of most big cable is the ground to give half a chance of clearing faults).

      The other major issue in recovery from this is the water ingress into the cable can be fatal to the insulation. Lot of money at risk for what can be a relatively common event.

      I've deal with investigations of people putting JCB blades through cables. Risk of burns or worse if you do fault the conductor while in your JCB is certainly non zero, and at minimum, new brown trousers needed.

      HSG47 practise for working close to it'll kill you cables is hand-tools-only. The cables armour is enough to resist a human jumping on a spade. But not a JCB.

      Disclaimer : please don't now go jump your spade on a cable to test this theory. It is not worth it.

      I also dealt with an incident where a canalboat owner jammed an iron mooring spike through one of our cables, spilling oil everywhere. The area was marked up as 'No mooring ' for this very reason. Only intervened. The cable was on maintenance at the time, so the worst outcome was an oil spill. Could easily have been a fatality.

      1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

        I was skippering a yacht when the guy I was in convoy with - vastly more experienced, also a complete idiot and fairly drunk at the time - dropped anchor in a bay in Greece where the main feed for the island came ashore. I pulled up a few hundred meters away and we went down with snorkels - best as we could tell he'd missed it by a few meters. So I can't tell you exactly what happens, but that's probably for the best. I know the fine was at least €10,000 because it was written on a BIG RED DO NOT ANCHOR SIGN clearly visible from where he anchored.

  13. Bebu

    CEOs Bonkers - most are in are in the billionaire lucresphere.

    "he and Elon Musk famously worked together in 2017 to install a 150MW battery"

    Hope Cannon-Brookes counted his fingers afterwards. :)

    When I heard of this project I thought at least they don't have to convert AC to DC but I still wondered whether the power could be transferred to the coast with HV DC or only AC is practical. I recall giant mercury vapour rectifiers were used but I suppose its all semiconductors now and I imagine rather impressive.

    I liked the giant battery idea to ship power to SG (and elsewhere.) Sort of an oil tanker for electicity. I imagine modular batteries the size of (very) large shipping containers that slot in and out of the carrier. I assume the ship itself would be battery powered. I can see returning flat batteries as a dead weight, along with the conversion efficiency and capital cost could render the idea uneconomic.

    I have a vague idea which I might have encountered in There Gister, of charging a type of battery then draining and shipping/pipeline the electrolyte to a destination where a discharged battery is refilled with the electrolyte and the spent electrolyte returned. You could repurpose all the surplus oil tankers. :)

    More practically, if you cannot export the electricity, I cannot see why industries like aluminium smelting couldn't be established near to the solar farm. Even desalinating seawater might be a profitable export in future as the world's reserves of fresh potable water are depleted.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: CEOs Bonkers - most are in are in the billionaire lucresphere.

      The UK had an aluminium foundry right next to Wylfas nuke reactors. Privatisation and the reversion to market rate for electric killed the aluminium plant.

      Cause and effect.

      1. blackcat Silver badge

        Re: CEOs Bonkers - most are in are in the billionaire lucresphere.

        The power contract ran out in 2009 and as the first reactor was turned off for the last time only 3 years later they had a pretty good run. Wylfa only outlasted the aluminium plant by 6 years, half of that at half power.

        Once Wylfa was in its last few years the writing was on the wall. Simple physics rather than some nefarious business thing.

  14. David Pearce

    Politics too

    Any cable from Australia to Singapore inevitably passes through Indonesian territorial waters..

    The North Sea cables don't have these 3rd party problems

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Politics too

      See recent events on NordStream and reconsider that comment.

      RN has deployed ships specifically to monitor for interference in North Sea assets for this reason!

  15. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

    Crazy thought:

    Since Singapore itself is actually closer to the equator than Australia, why not offshore rafts with solar panels connected directly to the shore?

    Sure, the engineering would probably be equally horrible, but it doesn't involve trying to lay a cable through either difficult underwater geology, or through equally difficult jungle across half of Indonesia.

  16. Box jelly fish

    Be a local hero

    Why think it has to be so complicated?

    Keep the farm. Power half of Australia, no underwater cable necessary...

    A lot less set up cost, maintenance cost, & no doubt sell electricity for the same price.

    Seems more dollars do not equate to more sense.

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