A $20 billion plan to power Singapore with Australian solar power is likely to be completely feasible and very profitable, but has required some ‘crazy folks’ to get it off the ground, billionaire backer of the project Mike Cannon-Brookes has said.
The Sun Cable project proposes to combine 10GW of solar PV with battery storage in the Northern Territory, and then connect this massive resource to Singapore via an 4,000km undersea cable.
Speaking at the National Smart Energy Summit in Sydney, Cannon-Brookes said each of these components, which have received initial investment from himself and resources billionaire Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest, would likely be the largest of their kind when completed.
“So, 10 gigawatts of solar – I think about four times the size of the largest current solar farm,” Cannon-Brookes said. “The battery will be 150 times the size of Hornsdale, so it’s insanely large.”
That said, Cannon-Brookes says there’s nothing “engineering-wise” in the Sun Cable project that can’t be built; while the economic modelling shows huge potential profit is possible.
“Then you get to needing a bunch of crazy folks are willing to say, ‘yeah, we’ll put in tens of millions of dollars to see if we can turn that from an inactive plan into a real plan. Because you know, we’re going to need $20 billion and by the time you need $20 billion, you better be damn sure it’s going to be possible,” he said.
