Sun comes up on $30bn Asia play

Special report: Take 125sq km of solar panels, a battery that’s 150 times bigger than the biggest in the country, three billion people, and a giant extension cord. Then call it Sun Cable … and watch emissions tumble and the dollars roll in.

IT SOUNDS like a wild science fiction scheme cooked up by a Bond villain. In fact, it is entrepreneur Mike Cannon-Brookes’ plan to power Asia with energy from the Australian sun … and it is fast becoming real.

The Atlassian co-founder and tech guru is building the world’s biggest solar farm in the middle of the Northern Territory, as well as what is literally a giant power cable stretching all the way from the Simpson Desert to Singapore.

Once complete, the project will give the 5.5 million-strong island metropolis up to 15 per cent of its total power needs.

But for Cannon-Brookes that is only the first step.

He says the AAPowerLink project will just be the first of many. He predicts that soon there will be power lines from Australia to all over Asia, selling them our cheap and abundant solar energy.

“Think about it as a giant extension cable that runs from our sunny deserts up to Asia,” CannonBrookes says.

“There are two or three billion consumers who want cheap energy and want a lot of that energy – and we have it and can provide it.

“I’m hopeful it’s the first of many, many, many cables that we string across to neighbouring countries.”

If the scale of the ambition seems staggering, that’s because it is. But everything about the Sun Cable project is on a staggering scale.

The initial stage of the project alone involves 5000km of power lines stretching from the middle of the NT to Darwin, and then 4200km underwater past the full length of Indonesia to Singapore.

This alone will be the world’s longest High Voltage Direct Current cable system.

There it will provide Singapore with all-clean and all-green power.

As well as being the world’s largest solar plant, it will also feature the world’s largest battery, capable of storing between 36 and 42 gigawatt hours. By contrast, Australia’s so-called “Big Battery” in South Australia stores just 129 megawatt hours, and is currently being expanded by 64.5MWh.

In other words, when CannonBrookes says his battery is 150 times bigger, he is actually underestimating it.

The whole project is expected to cost upwards of $30bn, with construction to start in 2024. Sun Cable says it will be providing power to Darwin just two years later in 2026 and to Singapore the year after

that, with the whole project to be completed by 2028.

If true, that would be an astoni shingly fast build. Approximately 2000 direct jobs are expected to be created in the development, construction and operation of the project, and more than $8 billion of investment is expected to be ploughed directly into Australian companies.

Once complete, the project is then expected to generate up to $2 billion in energy exports for Australia per year.

As well as being a cheap energy source for the giant Asian market, it will also flood the Australian market with cheap energy, starting with far cheaper rates in the NT.

“Australia should have the cheapest power on the planet,” Cannon-Brookes says.

“We have so many resources opportunities in our sun and wind. We are the lucky country in terms of where we sit geographically in the world and our natural resources when it comes to renewables. We can turn that into by far the cheapest energy anywhere in the world – which we should have, by rights.”

And when it comes to exports, Cannon-Brookes says Australia has all the ingredients needed to be an energy superpower.

“We have, as I mentioned, these two to three billion consumers to the north of us who are rapidly coming up the economic curve and what happens when a country gets wealthier is its average salary goes up and its energy consumption also goes up, and energy consumption goes up faster than salary,” he says.

“And so that is the market for it. Think about us creating this energy and then we have that market right up close to us.

“That is just a beautiful position to be in, and we should take advantage of that.

“I would say it’s the biggest economic opportunity than Australia has ever seen. It’s such an amazingly large opportunity.”