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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You don’t have to be an energy engineer to understand that solar and wind are not reliable sources. Why do they keep being used as solutions?
If you can actually make any sense of the numbers (its all a bit Musk-ese in its vagueness, largesse and odd use of units) this seems to be about 2-3 times bigger than anything else in existence, both in terms of distance and power levels. It will be interesting to see if it gets beyond the shearing the early investors stage.
Dust storm engulfs Tennant Creek
Posted 28 Feb 2005, 11:46pm
A thick dust storm has hit the outback Northern Territory town of Tennant Creek, reducing visibility to just a few metres.
Bureau of Meteorology observer, James Richardson, says the Barkly region’s dry February may have contributed to the amount of dust that the storm has shifted.
He says only 14.6 millimetres of rain has fallen in the region during the month compared to the average of 130mm.
Mr Richardson says the storm hit Tennant Creek late this afternoon but he expects it to pass through.
“From the north-east, it come in and we could see it at about two in the afternoon on the horizon,” he said.
“It’ll keep going past us and hopefully it will disappear.”
“4 years to line up the financing”….400 would be more like it. If they think proposing this boondoggle will help negotiate better LNG prices they’re as dumb as the proposed project.
Why does Singapore need an commuter for solar panels energy from Australia:
Because Singapore doesn’t need affordable energy. Singapore needs Status Symbols, excessive expensive regardless if it’s “renewable energy”:
Status in Singapore:
connections
family office / wealth management / personal bankers
access to private jets, yachts
length of address
ownership of capital
inheritance
type of credit card
flying first class
elite alma maters
high % of degrees in the family
private/expensive childhood education
country club membership(s)
employing a full-time chauffeur
frequent coffee at fullerton / other hotels
regular patronship of plays, operas, art galleries
ownership of expensive watches, jewelry, suits & dresses
expensive car ownership
normalized overseas vacations
frequent fancy restaurant patronage
‘parent scholarship’ (no bank loan post-graduation)
atas pursuits (ballet, violin, horses)
bottle service at clubs
expensive daily lunch salads / avoiding food courts
regular dental visits
plastic surgery
private/expensive hospitals
‘weekend getaways’ to regional beach spots
frequent skydiving / scubadiving
willingness to buy overpriced pastries at Starbucks and leave them unfinished
diverse/detailed knowledge about food, wine, cheese, etc
$4.5 bus rides
accent & code-switching
exclusive gyms / branded exercise clothing
growing up english-speaking
having cable TV (?)
weekend brunches
cocktail bars
juice cleanse diets
personal grooming (hair, nails, wax)
https://www.facebook.com/visakan.veerasamy/posts/10153112473648915?pnref=story
http://www.visakanv.com/sg/status-symbols/
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-huawei&ei=Sb9HXf-JD-nrrgTU5aeIDg&q=Singapore+status+symbols&oq=Singapore+status+symbols&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.
Complete nonsense, that is nothing like most Singaporean’s lives.
Chris
“Complete nonsense, that is nothing like most Singaporean’s lives.”
– I rather think that that is, precisely, Johann W’s point.
Those are – mostly expensive – ‘status symbols’.
You may like it, or you may not, but it is for real, albeit in a circle I never expect to move.
When I lived in Singapore, I saved my pennies, so came back to the UK and paid my [London] mortgage down to – well – pennies!
Auto
If only science could develop a method to transferring intelligence, common sense, morality, logic, rationality, and ethics into the brains of Leftist politicians, our problems would be solved, and insane government boondoggles like this one would never be considered…
Why science? Nature already has hunger, exposure, hypothermia, thirst, disease, toxins, venom, teeth, and claws.
For anyone still not getting the message that the planet is basically hostile, statistics won’t be convincing.
Amusing.
I am not sure if the map came with the original article or not, but the text talks about Tennant Creek in the NT , while the map has a big spot 1000km in Western Australia.
How much power will be lost by transmitting the electricity 3800km to Singapore?
How much water will be required in the desert to keep 150 square km of solar panels clean?
How long will the panels last before becoming uneconomic to operate?
How will they dispose of 150 square km of solar panels?
Will all the solar panels have concrete footings?
Will the land be rehabilitated after the solar farm is closed?
How long will the batteries last before needing replacement?
Etc
The capacity factor of solar farms is around 20% so the average output will be about 2GB.
A new high efficiency low emission coal plant could produce 2GB virtually 24/7 and occupy about 10 hectares and last 50+ years.
The solar farm will occupy 15,000 hectares (150 square km) and last about 25 years.
The insanity continues.
Wher’s it most efficient to place the batteries, near the panels or in Singapore?
efficiency isnt a concept in this project. you would think the batteries would be near the consumers, anything in oz would be an infrastructure requirement.
So how much battery storage would be needed? Let’s assume it’s a sunny day and they want to store 5GW for 5 hours and the price is $200/kWh.
5 x 1,000 x 1,000,000 x 200 = 1,000,000,000,000
Which is a trillion dollars.
5 x 5 x 1,000,000 x $200 gives a cost of $5 Billion for 25 GWh of storage. Half the cost of 1 gw nuclear capacity.
If the cost of the cable scales from the CobraCable 0.7 GW x 300 km for $4.7 Billion, the 3800 km cable for 5 GW would run $425 billion.
Maybe higher capacity is not any more expensive, in that case it’s still $50 billion to connect.
Floating or undersea nuclear plants would be cheaper than the undersea cable, even if the solar plant was free.
This thing sounds like another ‘solar roadway’sort if bad-at-math plan.
You would put the batteries in Australia so that the transmission cable is smaller, ie max current draw consideration of load versus max generation rate.
“…you would think the batteries would be near the consumers…”
You are proposing to site the world’s biggest incendiary bomb in the City of Singapore?
I rather think they have more sense. This mega-batttery would need to be in the middle of the desert – and along way away from the solar panels, so it could combust without panelageddon.
The whole article made me laugh: are we sure its intended to be taken seriously? Its great satire.
Imagine running a high voltage supply line directly through one of the most seismically active regions on the planet. Call that a life time job for the cable laying industries of the region.
Sounds pretty moronic to me. A 300km undersea HVDC cable has a transmission loss of about 20%. So a 3800km cable… there would be almost nothing left at the other end!
Gotta see the big picture here. There are billions in government subsidies and private financing to be siphoned off before declaring the project unfeasible, and flying away in private jets. The best cons are the ones that are so big that no one will believe it’s a con. Enron comes to mind.
I hope Al Gore invests and loses everything he has.
Two nuclear power plants built locally using a modern design would supply all of Singapore’s electrical needs for 10 more years. I would build 3 smaller ones just for redundancy. No need of politics, submarine power lines, loss of power due to long transmission, batteries, or solar panels that need to be constantly replaced and last no more than 20 years. Using MSR, waste is almost eliminated.
One large dust storm and loss of panels, and loss of power. One long cloudy period, loss of electricity. One mistake dragging the ocean, loss of power.
I cannot imagine the risk assessment of this project ever giving the green light.
But NOOooo, let’s go cover our desert landscapes with fragile glass panels, and build all the roads and infrastructure to maintain them, and create huge piles of glass scrap embedded with dangerous heavy metals instead.
Robert –
“solar panels that need to be constantly replaced and last no more than 20 years.”
I guess the ‘twenty years’ is from the marketing-to-mugs brochure.
Everything I have read here on WUWT indicates a shorter [perhaps drastically shorter] lifespan.
But it will guarantee green jobs in [Chinese? Vietnamese?] Solar Panel factories, seemingly for ever!
Auto
There are a few types of aolar PV cells. The output of silicon cells will drop by up to 0.007 per year / 15% in 20 years and the efficiency of new panels has steadily improved.
Where space is at a premium and more power is desired it might be worth replacing in 20 years, but most won’t actually stop working for 50 years or more.
Of course “Grapefruit sized hail” that smashes up cars can also break panels.
Nothing wrong with putting solar panels out in the desert, but 3,800 km of underwater cable is definitely a project-killer. Why don’t the Australians use the solar panels to supply power to an Australian city along the coast?
A few years ago one of the rural electrification organisations told me that solar power was much more expensive than diesel power. This was confirmed when I was trying to run a nature reserve island on solar power. Diesels were cheaper.
And where is the power coming from to produce all these solar panels and their associated interconnection and support framing parts?
Ooh, Ooh, I know, Chinese coal fired power plants!!!
It’s ironic because Singapore sets fuel prices for oil, petrol and diesel. Now we want to deliver solar power to them?
I am not an engineer but I do understand there would be transmission losses. what would they be over 4000 odd kilometres of cable? And what would Singapore use when Oz is in darkness? And there are some truly spectacular dust storms but the real killer would be the routine acretion of dust that happens all the time in effectively a desert.
If the batteries were in Australia, and there were enough of them, the cable major need to transmit only 30% or so of the installed capacity of solar cells. But the batteries would be impossibly expensive.
You are right that dust storms would be a major problem. It doesn’t take all that much dust to knock them back by 30%. Hordes of work for the teeming locals cleaning the glass.
I believe terms like “15,000 hectares” are disingenuous. Most people have no sense for what that means. I used google and discovered that it is an area 5.8×10 miles. Less than 60 sections of land. I think for most people, square miles or even square km is a more understandable term. I think hectares is used to make land area seem larger than it is.
Be sure and route the line through krakatoa.
Aye there’s probably a wee krack to drop the cable in.
Meanwhile businesses in Victoria Australia are installing backup diesel generators due to “when, not if” predicted power blackouts due to the fixation with the imaginary “renewables solution” the state government there has.
It’s common for farms, homes and businesses, hospitals, and critical infrastructure in Canada to have backup generators, especially in the 99% of the country where freezing to death in a winter power outage is a real possibility. I consider it part of the price we pay for living where there isn’t the most venemous… everything.
Long power outages are far less common here now than 30 years ago, because the equipment is better.
Most of our blackouts happen when equipment fails, or when ice, wind, or stupid people knock down utility poles.
And we already have the backup generators and a backup natural gas energy grid. ‘Cause we aren’t going to join the helpless whiners crying ‘climate change’ every time there’s a little deadly Canadian weather and the roads are closed.