Aust’s Two Richest Men Battle For An Unbuilt Solar Farm
Gordon Jackson remembers the hype around Sun Cable. “The world’s biggest solar farm,” is the pitch he recalls.
It was just a few years ago that Gordon, who owns a sub-contracting business in the outback town of Elliott, was helping the venture install a few dozen test PV panels at its proposed site, about 100 kilometres from his remote Northern Territory community.
“It was pretty hot that day. About 47 degrees,” Gordon recalls.
“It’s sunny there, from sun-up to sundown.”
But it turned out this sensational project was about more than sun.
It also needed a cable. And it is this feature that has now divided its two biggest backers, Mike CannonBrookes and Andrew Forrest.
Two of Australia’s richest men, who used to be partners on Sun Cable.
Now they are bidding against each other to control the collapsed entity, in a closed-door process that’s just weeks away from culminating.pile.”
Sun Cable was formed in 2018 by several people, including its current chief executive David Griffin, based across Singapore and Australia.
It publicly unveiled its vision in 2019.
At the heart of the plan was an ambition to transform Australia, one of the world’s biggest miners, into an exporter of renewable energy.
Sun Cable didn’t just want to build a solar farm that was visible from space. It also wanted to send much of the renewable power generated to the gasdependent island nation of Singapore.
To do this, Sun Cable needed to install a big battery network and run a 4,700km transmission line from the Northern Territory’s coastline all the way under the sea to its final destination. “When it was announced, Sun Cable was a daring idea,” Victoria University energy economist Bruce Mountain told ABC News. And it needed a lot of money, starting at A$30 billion (FJ$44.4b).
With an estimated wealth almost matching this, Mike Cannon-Brookes was the first major backer to publicly sign up through his private entity, Grok Ventures. At the time, the co-founder of software company Atlassian had just gained household fame for goading Tesla’s Elon Musk into building Australia’s biggest battery.
“I’m backing [Sun Cable],” Cannon-Brooks told the AFR back in 2019.
“We’re going to make it work. I’m going to build a wire.”
The even more wealthy Andrew Forrest came on a few months later, also through his private entity, Squadron.
In the media, the largest shareholder of iron ore exporter FMG described his investment in Sun Cable as motivated by “not just … reducing emissions” but “nation-building”.
Project excites government and locals
Both the Northern Territory and then the federal government soon gave Sun Cable major project status.
In 2020, it revealed that its proposed solar farm site was at Newcastle Waters, one of eight cattle stations owned by Consolidated Pastoral Company.
There were headlines about jobs, including 1,750 during construction and 350 ongoing roles across the project’s 70-year life span.
Elliott was the closest town to the proposed outback solar farm location.