The ambitious project may take more than a decade to finish, but the technology is almost ready
ByK.G. Chan
The desert outside Tennant Creek in Australia’s Northern Territory may hold the key to addressing Singapore’s future electricity supplies.
The world’s largest solar farm that could light up Singapore’s glittering shopping malls and office towers will be built on the barren dunes there.
It was reported that a huge amount of panels as well as supporting battery storage devices with a combined capacity of 10 gigawatts would be spread across 15,000 hectares of land there to ensure the solar farm could make the most of the outback’s clear skies and bright sunshine.
The bulk of the green electricity generated by this US$14.1 billion project would be exported to the city-state in Southeast Asia – equivalent to roughly one-fifth of its annual electricity consumption – via high-voltage submarine cables that will stretch about 3,800 kilometers.
The Northern Territory project to power Singapore, however, is still at a relatively early stage of planning.
The Guardian and Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao reported that it could take four years for the massive solar farm to lock in finance, with production scheduled to start mid-to-late next decade. Yet the project is now under the auspices of both governments in Singapore and Australia’s Northern Territory state government.
Singapore aims to shed its reliance on expensive gas-fired power generation and on supplies from Malaysia and Indonesia, while Australia, with the best renewable energy resource in the developed world, also aims to export more green energy instead of liquefied natural gas and heavy-polluting coal.
HT/Codetrader
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“Supply all of Australia’s AND the worlds electricity ?…. Really ?
…..Simply.. delusional !
As the Pope said “stop it or you will go blind”
(In the) pipe dreams…
Is it the Australians or Singapore that is virtue signalling? If Singapore leased land from Malaysia, it could build several multi-gigawatt nuclear power plants, and actually have dispatchable power for that price. I am quite sure the Chinese or South Koreans would gladly build them.
Nuclear energy has proven to be unreliable and needs constant maintenance, why not use baron land for the production of good clean sustainable energy which just so happens to get quite warm and sunny 😆
@Anthony Greene:
You misspelled “wind/solar” at the start of your comment.
I agree we should stick it to those wealthy barons but what does that have to do with the Outback?
Barons leased land from the King that was known as a manor. They were known as the Lord of the Manor and were in complete control of this land. … The Barons kept as much of their land as they wished for their own use, then divided the rest among their Knights.
yeah mate its warm n sunny
it hits the high 30s and upwards often which stuffs solar panels I gather
they have some ripper dust storms
the natives might get a bit(lot) restless over their land being used for this
they had a decent quake up there last week
might cause alignment issues for pv stsyems if it happened again
then of course why the HELL would we be selling power to asia when were going to be having shortages and blackouts ADMITTED for Vic n SA this summer.
frankly the cityfolks deserve the blackouts to wake em up
but when you need power to fight fires using pumps for borewater, not for luxury like aircon..its lot different
Im so wildly angry
were flogging off our natgas for cents per kilojoule to asia
yet we cop near imported petrol prices per litre for our cars n trucks running on it
and our turbines etc for power gen
and no we dont need to frack onshore when we have offshore fields there thanks.
NTgovt is in the crapper now over the 99yr lease to china for their port
mil and other interests ie ussa want it taken back
mainly cos your mil madmen wanna put a base and missile launch system on OUR land
funny how usa wanting to make us a nice target is enough to get them looking to revoke the lease?
In what world has nuclear proven to be unreliable? Not this one.
There is nothing clean about wind or solar.
‘baron’ land? Feudal times.
What is “baron” land?
An indictment on our education system.
I live in Sweden where 50+ % of electricity comes from nuclear plants, and has done so for about 40 years. Nuclear plants do need careful maintenance (as do all power plants) but has proven to be extremely reliable.
The only form of power that is even more reliable (and needs much less maintenance) is hydro power.
I am a hydropower engineer. I can assure you that nuclear stations are more than 100 times safer than dams. Dam failures have killed more than 250,000 people.
If you shut down a nuclear station in an organised fashion, and nobody goes near it, nobody will get hurt. If you abandon a large dam, it will eventually fail and may drown millions of people.
like Fukushima …
Uranium ressources are limited . You cannot build nuclear plants for ever. Radioactive rubbish will still represent an issue in 1000 years !!!
Uranium can be extracted from seawater for about $300 per pound. While technically limited and not renewable, the resource is sufficient for many thousands of years. And there are other fertile / fissionable elements such as plutonium and thorium.
Regardless, it’s utterly impractical to transmit electricity four thousand kilometres under the ocean. Unless you first invent a room temperature superconductor.
According to the United Nations committee on the effects of nuclear radiation no one has, or will, die of radiation from Fukushima. More than 1000 died as a result of panic driven unnecessary evacuations and heat strokes caused by shutting down other safe nuclear stations and causing power cuts.
Hubert, suggest you google thorium reactor. Or ask your 7th grade science teacher to help you look it up.
Please post any links you are aware of, to information on currently operating thorium fuelled reactors. They are probably theoretically the best fission reactor, granted, almost certainly cheaper than 4000 km of cable. But that’s a false dichotomy that doesn’t include all the other possibilities inclusing turning Singapore back into the small, sustainable fishing village it once was.
Right. There is already foreign territory in Singapure:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Singapore+leased+land+from+Malaysia%2C&oq=Singapore+leased+land+from+Malaysia%2C&aqs=chrome.
The Russians are currently the leaders in exporting nuclear power stations.
“Russia leads the world at nuclear-reactor exports”
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/08/07/russia-leads-the-world-at-nuclear-reactor-exports
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-o-s/russia-nuclear-power.aspx
The cost of this dispatchable electricity is 5-6 cents per KWh
Malaysia and Singapore are rivals, Singapore will never put their energy dependence on Malaysia. It’s for that reason that Singapore has spent billions to build desalination plants, and billions to build an LNG port.
The stupid. It burns.
In this case, “burns” could be the end result. (certainly of the money involved).
The money, it burns.
Wow. If they think electricity from modern gas turbine-combined cycle stations is expensive, wait ’til they see the bills from this clunker. Batteries? 4,000 km of underwater cables? Solar cells in Australia, where they have the windstorms?
No wonder the financing is not yet established. Good luck…
Can you cite the windstorms in the area this solar farm is planned to be built in?
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Wind-Regions-of-Australia-5_fig1_266874962
Donald, Internet search is as easy as asking questions on WUWT
I can’t cite them but I’ve seen mighty dust storms there. Have you ever worked there?
The country is barren and dusty, you don’t need much wind to constantly cover the solar panels. People would have to be employed to clean them. The pay would have to be high to get them to live in such a barren, inhospitable place.
Donald L. Klipstein, Australian outback windstorms:
https://www.google.com/search?q=windstorms+outback+australia&oq=windstorms+outback+australia&aqs=chrome.
Why not just build a complex of Small Modular Reactors?
No virtue to signal there…
They have got to be joking?
Singapore needs a reliable supply day and night. Solar power is good for about six hours per day. What is going to provide all the power the rest of the time? What is going to provide the power on a cloudy day or during a duststorm?
The cable will cost at least $300,000/ km – a total of ~ $1.2 billion for a single cable– and two will probably be needed.
Singapore would be far better off with small modular nuclear reactors that are safe, cheap, and reliable.
Lighting up daytime Singapore with daytime solar power from Australia is a doozy, but humor is lost on “greens”
It’s OK. Australia is in the other hemisphere. That’s how it works, right?
Correct..Having some experience with connecting solar farms to the grid. Trying to transport 10 GW of power, 3,600km will be not economically feasible. Mind you that ,nominal,10 GW is only good for about one hour at midday. The output dramatically rises and drops off as the sun moves overhead. High temperatures will cut the peak output to around 80%. The best solar farms are only operating at around 25% of their nameplate ratings, in terms of GWhrs delivered.
If they are going to install millions of these solar panels in OZ, they may as well use a solar panel that utilizes all the thermal heat that is wasted and make fresh potable water as an extra. The solar panel still generates the same electricity regardless of the thermal heat being used to filter fresh potable water through a low tech evaporative desalination process.
Since the solar panel gets hot roasting out in the sunlight all day, salty or brine water is heated with the panel and the water vapor wafts through a porous polystyrene membrane that filters out salt and other contaminants, allowing clean water to condense on the other side. The article below says it would generate 1.7 L per hour per panel. If you have a million panels, then that starts to add up to a small chunk of potable water they could use for a commercial use like agriculture or sell on the market. Water is becoming valuable too, and if these panels could do double duty, then maybe there is a bit more value to this exercise.
This is still a prototype from the article below, so not sure of the final specs. Don’t yell at me…
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/solar-powered-device-produces-energy-cleans-water
The only problem with the idea of using the panels to supply potable water as well as electricity is that they will be hundreds of miles from a reliable supply of feed water. Further, they are probably more than a thousand miles from where the potable water can be properly utilised. All of this amounts to a major project on its own, and it all hangs on the long term viability of the solar power scheme. I don’t think such a scheme is likely to fly.
Maybe just to clean the million panels..it isn’t a huge amount of water, but would be drinking quality potable water from any dirty water supply. Maybe 10-15 gallons a day per panel depending how efficient this process is and how many installed panels. There is usually some sort of ground water available in a desert via drilling wells etc, but may be brackish which would be ideal for this process. Could also catch any rain water and dew etc, so maybe more.
It is an interesting concept that should be explored, more I think for third world conditions where their water is either in short supply, real dirty and very expensive to obtain. The Israelis use drip irrigation in intensive agriculture operations and make their water go a long way, so perhaps there could be some type of intensive local horticulture operation along with this solar idea. At least there would be some extra productive use of the solar panel concept with may have some utility other than expensive electricity.
Unfortunately the site is well outside the Great Artesian Basin, and I rather doubt that there is much groundwater in this area. There is certainly some up in Kimberley but that is a long way off.
Well…
A desert area can be immensely fertile – if you can get water to the land. I don’t know the geology of the Australian desert, but we here in Arizona grow a lot of wheat, citrus, nuts, etc. So do the desert areas of southern California.
If you can contemplate building a 3,800 kilometer high power cable under the ocean, the idea of running a few hundred miles of pipeline / aqueduct to the ocean isn’t a big stretch at all. (The joker, of course, would be whether the energy required for pumping is too big of a bite out of the power generated.)
Supplying power when the sun don’t shine seems to be “handled” by a rather enormous battery farm. Now, does anyone ever contemplate that your battery farm has to be air-conditioned in the middle of a hot desert summer? (Accidentally leave your cell phone out on the workbench this time of year in Tucson. Pick it up a couple of hours later, and your 98% charge is down to 6%. My own stupid fault…)
There’s at least 15 rare birds in that area…and we can kiss the last of the wild Lady Gouldians good bye
In that part of the desert the rainfall varies between 44” and 8”
66% of it falls over 3 months during The Wet
The evaporation rate is up to 10 feet per year, the soil is poor.
Pipe in water from where it can be piped and pumped in from, distill it, and use it for agriculture. Such as growing something that people will pay for, and that grows like weeds with warmth and lots of sunshine. Grow something that will be profitable enough to fund growing less-profitable plants that fertilize the soil these plants will be growing in.
pop is around 3,200 and most of those are miners FIFO.
some own the supply/shops
the rest are indigenous and prob live around not in the township
its another of our Ass end of nowhere places
So there will be no light after sundown? Considering Australia was silly enough to spend huge bucks on a Tesla battery that keeps the lights on for what, 5 minutes maybe, I don’t think I’d buy power from them. I like living in a country with reliable electricity. Guess not everyone does.
Betraying your own stupidity if you think that is what that battery does. Good luck with the superiority thing , the renewable disease and all its downstream affictions seems pretty widespread.
The battery has worked out very well, and has maintained grid frequency much better than a fossil fuel only system did.
You must work harder, Boxer.
isn’t the battery there to give standby generators time to start?
or am I thinking about other locations that do that.
No, the battery is probably there to overcome the “burstiness” of wind which can be generating hundreds of megawatts one minute, and next to nothing a few minutes later before the next burst. Think the eye of a hurricane for an extreme example. For solar imagine passing clouds.
Note that Elon Musk et al have been less than forthcoming about what the battery is good for. That in itself should be a clue that the damn thing is probably oversold even though it’s quite likely useful enough to justify the cost.
And to spread out 10 GW during 6 hrs/day to 2.5 GW 24 hrs/day you would only need about 350 similar batteries costing about $30 billions.
Without doubt the dumbest most complicated means of producing power for Singapore.
No mention, as per usual , of actual production – just a claim that there will be a capacity
of 10 gigawatts, which will exist for a small portion of time at high noon, assuming no clouds.
and where will Singapore get its backup power from? No mention of actual outputs. Battery capacity also not mentioned but can’t provide max power for any extended period.
10 gigawatts of solar capacity generally translates to 50 or 60 gigawatt hours per day depending upon irradiance. That means it averages roughly 2 to 2 1/2 gigawatts during 24 hours. One can build the equivalent power capacity using small molten salt modular reactors, which cost roughly $2.5 billion for a gigawatt of continuous power or roughly $6 billion to produce the required 2 1/2 gigawatts of average power .It will require smaller and cheaper batteries to allow for the reactors ‘ power to be concentrated as necessary during the day and night. Unlike the solar system, it will not require costly backup power generation. And it can be accomplished sooner than this project. And Singapore will have no dependence upon Australia. The molten salt nuclear reactors will be probably 5 times cheaper than the solar system described.
…roughly $2.5 billion for a gigawatt. Ok, maybe if it’s been done already for near that, otherwise it might be 25 billion by the end of the first year of actual operation. Still maybe a better chance of a nuclear moon shot project than an undersea cable and battery.
“One can build the equivalent power capacity using small molten salt modular reactors, which cost roughly $2.5 billion for a gigawatt of continuous power or roughly $6 billion to produce the required 2 1/2 gigawatts of average power”
Do you have some examples of where this has been done? Or did you just make this up?
Singapore is surrounded by Malaysia and Indonesia. I don’t know how they’re going to get the power from Australia to Singapore without going through one or both of those countries. That leaves Singapore dependent on Malaysia and/or Indonesia. map
pretty easy not to go through Malaysia, then there is that whole ocean thing
There is no international water around Singapore. The cable will have to be laid across the Indonesian (and perhaps Malaysian) EEZ.
Because it never gets cloudy or dark in Australia?
At the location of the blue dot, it probably rains once every 20 years or so. So in this case, they’re pretty safe.
I suggest that you read
Ve2
August 4, 2019 at 7:20 pm
And so is written the epitaph on cheap power prices in Singapore. These guys need to look pragmatically at the impact of renewables on power prices, the greater the penetration of wind and solar into our grids, the higher the electricity price. They want to swap thermal power generators at their doorstep in return for unreliable, intermittent electrons coming down a 3800km power line. Where previously Singapore’s grid costs (for local generators) was negligible, they can now enjoy an impost that will ~double (?) the power cost, particularly bearing in mind submarine cables can cost as much as ten times that of conventional overhead transmission. For what?. To swap the relatively negligible physical footprint of a thermal fleet for a 15,000 Ha solar farm. That’s 150Km2!. With the requirement to capture the latency in the system, the true capital cost is that of the solar installation and cable, and 10 Gw of conventional generation capacity.
Coincidentally, Singapore Power Group has recently introduced “Green” credits, where you can “buy” renewable energy. The final line of this article, where Australia plans to export more “Green Energy” in place of LNG and coal is not supported by the facts, where Australia is about to become the worlds largest LNG supplier, and has exported increasing tonnages of both thermal and metallurgical coal every year.
There is a rather significant tectonic plate boundary between origin and destination.
Are they designing some sort of undersea structure to cope with this?
The map “Sunlight in Australia” doesn’t seem to be related to the subject. The centre of the green circle is in WA, out in the Great Sandy Desert. How they going to keep the dust off the screens?
I think they will probably route via Perth and follow the comms cables to skirt that inconvenience. That will sort of blow the 3800km thing though.
Atlantropa, Desertec take 2 ? Like North Africa was supposed to power Europe.
Somehow didn’t work out, almost flat-spined Siemens in the process.
Truckloads of money will change owners without further effect. And that’s it.
Dare I ask how long the batteries will supply power for at night or cloudy days? How much CO2 and fossil fuel is required to manufacture and install the solar panels and the 3,800 km of cabling? What will be the power loss over 3,800km of power cable and the horrendous environmental damage caused by its manufacture, installation and disposal at end of life? Who will take responsibility when it fails and they have blackouts? Also, as they will require fossil fuel powered back-up why don’t they just stick with the cheaper, gas fired power stations they are still going to require anyway?
The daytime temperatures out there will be horrendous. And I’m pretty sure the batteries will need to be air conditioned to a low temperature. I get the feeling that a lot of power will be used just to keep the thing from burning a hole to China.
It might be a good idea to use sodium-sulfur batteries. They operate at 300 degrees C. The largest existing plant in Japan has a capacity of 50 MW for two hours.
If we assume that those 10 GW during 6 hours is to be spread out as 2.5 GW during 24 hours it would take 450 Tsukuba-sized batteries. They are good for about 2500 cycles, so would have to be replaced over about 7 years, or a little more than one new battery per week.
It’s OK, it wont hit China. The hole will come out in the mid Atlantic accoring to this : https://www.antipodesmap.com/
Then the water from there could be used to cool it, or to distill potable water 🙂
The fact that an article like that can get written AND published confirms the sheer stupidity of journalists and editors. Once upon a time they would have asked pertinent questions like “what will be the delivered cost of the power?” and “what is the loss factor on the cable running from Australia to Singapore?”. Now they just regurgitate any press release, no matter how moronic. And then they wonder why they lose readers.
There hasn’t been a decent editor since Perry White.
Let Singapore and Australia try it out. If it works and makes sense economically then we’ll copy it in the American Southwest. If it doesn’t work then it’s their loss… not ours.
I have a better idea.
Move Singapore to northern Australia. Give it the land and let it be completely independent of Australia. It would be beneficial to everyone.
If we simply strip mine the entirety of the earth, then cover it with solar panels and bird chopping windmills, we can save the planet from humanity!
“The article below says it would generate 1.7 L per hour per panel. If you have a million panels, then that starts to add up to a small chunk of potable water they could use for a commercial use like agriculture or sell on the market. ”
or to wash the panels.
First find the water.
It will never happen, free energy is always more expensive than fossil fuels.
Screw the desert ecosystem, eh? I don’t want to live there and it isn’t making anyone any money, so it isn’t worth anything. We can use it to, um…save ecosystems!!!
…And the head of political correctness disappears one more inch up its own arse.
Might be cheaper to relocate Singapore to the Kimberleys?
I didn’t see your comment before I made a similar comment.
Spot on. That would be the simple option and there might be a chance some solar power from Australia could even supply the new nation state moved there with a bit of energy.
What is the point of posts like these? The total value of residential real estate in Singapore is $1T. Commercial and industrial real estate will be worth at least half that much if not more. And you expect Singapore to just abandon that investment?
Singapore is in the center of ASEAN, it’s geographical location is the main reason for its prosperity. And you are suggesting they give that up?
The transmission loss for high voltage lines ranges from 0.5% to 1.1% per 160 km. The minimum loss over 3,800 km is then 11.2%, and the maximum 23%. T. Boone Pickens wouldn’t build his wind farms in Texas unless someone else paid for transmission lines to carry the power to…faraway Oklahoma! Sending power 3,800 km is more like generating electricity in New York and sending it by wire to California!
This is absolutely nuts. Better to use the power to synthesize methane from captured CO2 and electrolytically produced hydrogen via the Sabatier reaction, and ship it to the (existing) Singapore natural gas-fired power plants. Even then, the economics are anything but assured.
Not to overlook the up to 25% energy losses from converting Direct Current electricity to Alternating Current to enable sending energy long distance.
Fifty percent energy losses before Singapore gets usable energy.
What will be the cost of that electricity at their sockets?
One suspects this is a renewable energy dodge, much like ones already in use in America and Europe.
Specifically, the dodge where once renewable energy enters a general transmission line, all users interconnected can claim their energy usage is renewable energy?
There have been recent developments with HVDC cables which resolve that problem. check it out.
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/high-voltage-dc-power-transmission-hvdc-replace-ac-power-systems/
As usual, Griff is being economical with the truth. When he says “resolve that problem”, what he means is “may resolve that specific problem without introducing worse ones, depending on the outcome of future research and development – just not today.”
Wow. Tennant Creek (pop. 3,000) looks to be on the northern edge of the middle of nowhere. Google maps Sat. view shows what looks to be hard desert. Many town are shown which have no road to them at all. Possibly mining towns with dirt roads, or classic “you just have to know the way”. The only road out to the south is to Alice Springs, several hundred miles away.
Great place for a solar installation, I guess.
These projects keep failing, and people keep building them.
I see now why they say that termites are the main source of CO2. This is at a random location on the highway below Tennant Creek.
https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-20.0628933,134.2078876,3a,75y,75.73h,87.34t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sPJfHqG_DnJfQNZgd_m3AJg!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo2.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DPJfHqG_DnJfQNZgd_m3AJg%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D300%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656
They are also the main source of methane too.
The spot shown on the map is nowhere near Tennant Creek. It’s not even in the right state. Bear in mind that Australia is about the same land area as the 48 contiguous US states. WA takes up about one third of that space (think everything left of Texas) and the population of 2.5 or so million is clustered in the SW around Perth. Where that circle is located is about as desolate and remote as anywhere in Australia.
I often say, think of Perth as San Diego (similar climate even), and the nearest city is Houston (Adelaide). There is very little in between.
Also, why the heck would they build transmission lines all the way to Singapore? Surely it would be more efficient to use the energy to create a fuel (hydrogen?) and transport that to Singapore?