Ambitious plans to power Singapore with the world’s biggest solar farm, from approximately 2,500 miles away in Australia’s Northern Territory, have taken a step closer to becoming a reality. Called Sun Cable, the 10-gigawatt-capacity array of panels will be spread across 15,000 hectares outside Tennant Creek, deep in the Northern Territory and will be backed up by battery storage to ensure it can supply power 24/7. From Tennant Creek, transmission lines will send some of the electricity to Darwin and plug into the Northern Territory grid, however, the bulk of the electricity would be exported via a high-voltage direct-current submarine cable snaking through the Indonesian archipelago to Singapore. The solar farm will be able to supply about 20% of Singapore’s electricity needs replacing its increasingly expensive gas-fired power.
If and when the Sun Cable project does start to produce electricity it might not be the world’s largest solar farm for long. A similarly ambitious proposal is being worked on for the Pilbara, in the north of Western Australia, where another group of developers are working on an even bigger wind and solar hybrid plant to power local industry and develop a green hydrogen manufacturing hub. The Asian Renewable Energy Hub proposal has grown from 11GW to 15GW and will be the largest wind-solar hybrid in the world according to its developers. Both projects are still in the planning stages, however, if all goes to plan and with “a following wind” both hope to be producing electricity by the mid to late 2020s.
One big upside for Australia if these projects, along with others, were to come online, would be to help it meet its commitment to the Paris climate agreement. The exportation of electricity for renewables would go some way to counterbalance Australia’s more traditional exports of coal, iron ore and liquefied natural gas.