Did anyone notice how cheap this is? Ten gigawatts at AUD $16B is roughly the same as 1 GW per USD $1B. Compare that to, say, a nuclear power plant, where a single 1 GW plant might cost five to ten billion after all of the approvals and the interest on the loan.
If the price estimate is correct, Singapore would be crazy not to do it. The only issue I see is the risk of cable cuts and future geopolitical changes.
Unfortunately, within Australia, coal is currently so cheap that even low-cost solar can't really compete.
> Unfortunately, within Australia, coal is currently so cheap that even low-cost solar can't really compete.
That's only true for existing power stations. For new coal stations there is no way to make them competitive with large scale solar or wind.
The levelized cost of power from new coal plants is calculated to be between $76 per megawatt hour and $205.60 per megawatt hour depending on black vs brown coal, if you include a risk premium on financing and whose estimates you believe.
In 2017 the Victorian government signed a 12 year deal for $50 to $60 per megawatt hour for a wind farm, and the new Golden Plains wind farm will be under $50/MWh.
Adding storage costs a bit more: between $83.40 and $129.30 per MW/h for pumped hydro storage, or $138/MWh for batteries.
That is a 10GW solar array, at 22% capacity factor, so comparable to 2 VVER-1200 with a $12B contract like Rooppur, also the solar panels/batteries will last 20-25 years and the VVER 60.
> also the solar panels/batteries will last 20-25 years and the VVER 60
The solar array and battery storage (all of which can be recycled today with existing recycling techniques) will be built on time, begin generating on time, and will generate no nuclear waste nor require fuel (besides sunlight) during its operating lifetime. It takes over 10 years to build a VVER-1200 reactor [1] (any fission reactor, really), if you can even get the reactor to the finish line.
Very important point, especially when we're considering costs.
What are the lifetime costs associated with storing the spent fuel? In practice, the only way to get reactors built, is for the public to 100% subsidize the long term consequences.
Sure, that would be an option. Thus far even the US government is not exploring this option, mostly due to very high costs, but also due to weapons grade byproducts of most existing reprocessing methods.
> The solar array and battery storage (all of which can be recycled today with existing recycling techniques) will be built on time, begin generating on time...
Steady on, that is a prediction for a project where data is light. The most comparable experience Australia has to this stuff is the Basslink which broke in 2015-16 and triggered a major energy crisis in Tasmania. And I think technically means that 50% of Australia's major undersea cables have been involved in an energy crisis.
This is a major project. It is not yet clear it will be delivered on time and on budget. It is very a very exciting project nonetheless.
Maintenance and redundancy of HVDC transmission capacity is a more tractable problem than cost efficient storage & reprocessing of nuclear waste and nuclear generator decommissioning at end of service life. Basslink was mismanaged, and that's a tractable problem as well.
Could this project be late? Of course. "Nuclear generator late and over budget"? No.
This cable is 3,700 km; the current longest undersea cable is ~600 km [0]. This is nearly an order of magnitude longer than any undersea cable previously run.
You've got no data this one. It has never been done before and even the people directly involved in the project can't be sure what surprises may or may not be in store as they push the boundaries of engineering practice.
> Could this project be late? Of course. "Nuclear generator late and over budget"? No.
This is bald-faced fabrication. I've never been confronted with quite so blatant a guess presented as a confident fact.
Even arguing that "nuclear projects can't be completed to plan" is in itself a bit much - planning standards can change. Bad planning isn't a property of nuclear electricity and good planning isn't a property of undersea cables.
This could easily be $50 billion down the drain and the project is still never completed. The risk is there.
You're correct I might be overly optimistic (although I believe my reasoning is sound based on the historical track record of nuclear vs transmission construction).
I've reached out to an academic with numerous papers authored on the topic of HVDC submarine cables, and inquired as to the feasibility and challenges a 3700km HVDC submarine link might face (to provide a comparison to those faced by the construction of nuclear generators). I'll report back with my findings.
Also, this is the first idea of its kind. Once it gets more popular, prices will drop, as they have been doing so for solar for about 2 decades now.
Nuclear, on the other hand, has a negative pricing curve. It gets increasingly more expensive with the passing of time. The only solution are completely new ideas, that to be fair are being researched and a lot of money is invested in them, but nothing has made it to scalable production yet.
sorry, could you dumb this down a little? how does this affect the price/GW? (I'm not questioning it does, I'm saying I don't understand the rest of what you said)
I think the idea is that 10GW of solar only produces on average as much power as a 2.2GW "normal" power plant. So during the best parts of the day you're getting all 10GW. At night you're getting 0GW. On cloudy days you're getting less than 10GW. If you average it all out over a year you get about the same amount of total energy output from the 10GW solar plant as you would a 2.2GW traditional power plant.
So once you do that it goes from $1/watt to more like $4.50/watt. And it starts to look about the same as nuclear if in fact you can spend $5b and you get 1GW.
One nice thing about nuclear is that it's super steady 1GW 24/7 vs the solar needs to have battery storage too, and those batteries aren't free.
Oh that's my mistake then! I read the article looking for that but I didn't see it. I guess I didn't read it thoroughly enough.
I do agree that over the course of the next 10-50 years renewables + storage is likely to be cheaper.
What I'm not sure about is if "the grid" will be cheaper or if we'll end up seeing the renewables self-ownership spiral that causes folks to disconnect from the grid, driving prices up for everyone else on the grid, thus causing more people to disconnect, etc. When renewables are cheap and your house's usage is fairly well known (see years of smart meter historical data) then at some point it becomes economically feasible to be your own grid.
With today's low interest rates is nuclear actually getting more expensive? Traditionally all the interest on the loans that builds up between when the approval process starts and when construction finishes was the big driver of nuclear costs but since 2009 commercial loan rates are a lot lower than they were beforehand.
The Capacity Factor (essentially a plant's uptime) is important to consider, but isn't 100% for the other plant types either, though. Nuclear has 93% in the US, coal has 54%, and Solar PV 26%[0]. The 22% quoted by hokkos is probably specifically for PV plants in Australia.
Would I be right in thinking that replacing parts of a solar plant could be done without a huge impact on production? Eg replacing a reactor means it’s offline. Replacing all the panels means a percentage of the plant is offline at a given time.
If you mean coal based power is currently cheap within Australia, it's absolutely the opposite, electricity prices in Australia are some of the highest in the world: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
It's US$16B, and 10 gigawatts is nameplate. 25% capacity factors are typical for solar PV, whereas nuclear would be more like 90%. So it would compare more accurately to a ~2.8 GW nuclear power plant.
> the risk of cable cuts and future geopolitical changes
The two risks are intertwined: A hostile state in the region with modern submarines (gee, I wonder who that could be?) is likely to be perfectly capable of cutting the cable — which would give the hostile state the ability to hold Singapore hostage, perhaps in support of exerting power in the Strait of Malacca maritime choke point and/or in the South China Sea. If I were Singapore's leaders, I'd want at least one Plan B.
1 GW per billion dollars is dirt-cheap compared to solar power in America, too. Thinking of two of the largest PV installations in California. One was $2.4 billion for 550 MW and another was $1 billion for 130 MW.
Compare to DESERTEC, a plan to send power from North African solar farms under the Mediterranean to Europe with huge DC cables. They’ve been at it a while and I haven’t seen any signed of progress in a decade.
It’s possible AU+SG May have more organizational success. Only two players, both OECD countries. But the technical hurdles remain immense.
In 2013, the President of Mali asked France for help in stopping an attack on the capital Bamako by Islamic groups from the North of the country, whose goal was to establish a second Islamic state in the Sahel region, modeled after the Islamic State of Iraq which was developing at that same time. Four fighter jets were sent from France to stop the attackers as they were driving down south in pickups and were just a few hours away from taking the capital Bamako.
7 years later, the French forces are still on the ground, trying to help in stabilizing not only Mali, but also the whole Sahel region. With little stabilization success so far, but a second Islamic state in this area was avoided thanks to this intervention.
Re-occupying North Africa for its natural resources also guarantees the doom of the project in short order, as well as a huge cost of money, lives, CO2, and everything else.
"Ensuring stability with force" does not work. Stability can only be ensured with prosperity.
This seems incorrect, and maybe wishful thinking?. There have been many brutal societies (and colonies, empires and so on) that lasted for centuries.
Certainly a lot of military "interventions" in the past couple of decades have been pretty disastrous though.
I propose a "you break it you buy it" model. Until such time as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have peace and good governance, no more military adventures to spread liberal democracy.
Well, it can't say it's bad, but it may not be realistic. Don't forget the famous war that was supposed to "ensure stability with force", and that's been lasting for almost 20 year. Things are certainly more complicated there, but it's fair to be skeptical that force can bring stability.
The fact they put Roland Berger, a consultant, on the front page rather than people who would actually run or work on the project says all there is to say about this coming to fruition.
It would be interesting to see those huge tesla batteries on a large ship,(like a retired oil supertanker) charging at one point, and discharging at the destination. Leave enough to power the ship back home, and just have several of them. Probably not as efficient as power lines, but could go to multiple destinations.
Singapore is already supplied with energy from ships (natural gas). So energy density will determine how many ships would be required. Depending on conversion efficiency, we are talking 50-150x as many lipo ships as natural gas ships.
If Singapore only needed one natural gas very large super tanker, we would need to increase the global feet of super tankers by 7-20% just to ship electrical energy to Singapore.
Another option for "shipping electricity" is compressed hydrogen. Electricity + water goes in at one end (electrolysis), then converts back to electricity + water at the other (fuel cells).
Hydrogen has significant inefficiencies and conversion losses compared to batteries, but the energy density is much higher (up to 40,000 Wh/kg)
There is mention in this thread of solar power prices going negative for suppliers at times. This would make suggestions like this even more favourable.
Yep, a very expensive alternative to a powerplant, given that full gravimetric capacity will not be achievable, but think further if batteries will continue improving, and becoming cheaper.
If they can get usable flow batteries on a ship, this will be quite an option to powerships even today.
The electrical power of the entire USA could be supplied by a PV station much smaller than Nevada. In the desert southwest you can average 6 kW-h/day/m^2 over a full year. Nation consumes approximately 4.2 PW-h/year. Therefore you need about 2 billion square meters of PV panels (2E9 x 6E3 x 365.25 =~ 4.4E15). That's an area of only 45 km per side (45000 x 45000 > 2E9). Nevada is about 500km wide and has an area of almost 300 billion square meters. So you'd need about 1% of Nevada to power the whole country.
Not to say batteries aren’t crucial, but you are comparing apples and oranges.
That battery is only used for a very small peak / corner case and at least when I looked at the numbers last year hadn’t yet paid for its cost, despite some breathless claims. I do expect it to pay off though.
The entire demand for a battery like that for a country like Australia is probably one unit. And it’s no accident that it was installed in south Australia, not one of the more densely settled states.
It was a good PR stunt, but doesn’t really teach anything special.
It's been a lot more than a PR stunt, it's alerted the community to severe market distorting pricing practices and saved the state millions. It's already running in profit on the part which is not contracted to prevent bidding wars and it's being extended physically. It did have a huge PR element in its deployment but it's real, and it does a real job. It's role in frequency stabilisation stopped potential blackouts when long lines to NSW and Victoria died. (Islanding SA and potentially causing rolling blackouts from frequency instability)
> when I looked at the numbers last year hadn’t yet paid for its cost, despite some breathless claims.
Well.. of course? 2 years payoff would seem unbelievably fast for any infrastructure project. It did save $40M last year alone though (the project cost $86M).
> The entire demand for a battery like that for a country like Australia is probably one unit. And it’s no accident that it was installed in south Australia, not one of the more densely settled states.
Err.. no.
There are around 40 proposed or signed projects in Australia larger than that battery.
This is a political project. It's difficult to consider it otherwise in a rational decision making context.
Any engineer would take one look at this and go yep, let's put a nuclear reactor on one or more of Singapore's 64 surrounding islands.
Singapore could get oodles of solar from Malaysia but they obviously aren't interested in doing that. Since the guys financing it have no qualms about fronting this project obviously Singapore is keen to fund this project as a customer but wants to be seen for some reason as a reluctant buyer.
> Singapore could get oodles of solar from Malaysia but they obviously aren't interested in doing that
To anyone who knows the history of Singapore, it is obvious why (and you quite possibly already know all this, but I'm sure many other people reading this don't). Singapore became independent because the Malaysian government wanted to introduce "affirmative action" laws which discriminated against ethnic minorities, especially ethnic Chinese. Singapore was the only state of Malaysia with an ethnic Chinese majority, and was fundamentally opposed to such laws. The Malaysian federal government's response was to expel Singapore from Malaysia and force it to become an independent country, so that it would be free to impose these laws on the rest of Malaysia without Singapore's opposition. And Singapore has never trusted Malaysia since.
Is that really true? Malaysia has official policies to give preference to the ethnic Malay majority in education, government jobs, business licensing, etc. Singapore's formal policies on those matters are, to the best of my knowledge, ethnically and racially neutral. I'm sure ethnic minorities in Singapore suffer from some degree of informal discrimination (as they do in many other countries), but I don't believe they suffer from anything like the active discrimination as an official policy which the Malaysian government imposes.
There is some governmental discrimination, notably in the military (Malays are effectively excluded from sensitive positions) and granting residency/citizenship (reportedly virtually impossible for ethnic Malays from Malaysia or Indonesia). Both are officially denied though, and yes, these are nowhere near as wide-ranging as Malaysia's policies.
If an ethnic Chinese Singaporean marries a Malaysian Malay, the Singaporean government will cite every rule in the book about income requirements and "suitability".
But if we're talking Malaysian Chinese....
People need to stop worshipping Singapore like they are a fantasy land of perfection. They have specific flaws of their own, plus flaws similar to other countries.
I'm not sure if that is anti-Malay so much as pro-Chinese.
An older friend told a story of a colleague he worked with in Vietnam who got married and tried to move back to Singapore. Multiple attempts to let his wife come along were rejected until he amended the paperwork to say she was Chinese ethnicity.
Might be a tall tale, but that's how it was told to me. I don't know the exact years in question though, it might have been a decade or more ago.
There are no stats published, so this is all anecdotal, but it's generally suspected that they operate on some kind of quota basis. The Chinese quota is large (but no longer infinite, esp for mainland Chinese), the Indian/Other quota is small, and the Malay/Muslim quota is nearly zero.
I certainly don't "worship Singapore" as some "fantasy land of perfection".
Personally, I am still angry at Singapore over the execution of Van Tuong Nguyen.
Malaysia at least is working on trying to abolish the death penalty. Singapore doesn't appear interested in that.
Malaysia is definitely ahead of Singapore in the area of political pluralism (although it is too early to say whether Malaysia's recent improvements in this area are going to endure.)
On the other hand, in the specific area of treatment of ethnic minorities, I still believe Singapore is ahead of Malaysia. The Singaporean government does ethnically discriminate in some areas, but to a far lesser extent than the Malaysian government does
Religious freedom is another area in which I'd say Singapore remains ahead of Malaysia: the Singaporean government imposes some restrictions on non-mainstream religious groups (like Jehovah's Witnesses and Unification Church), but it is officially neutral in religious matters; Malaysia's government does not display anywhere near the same neutrality
The rampant racism in the Singapore public schools, the casual everyday racism and micro-aggressions that Singapore minorities face, local Chinese owned company’s using Mandarin as requirement to exclude minorities, lack of representation in ads/commercials/billboards for minorities, the openly racist statement made by politicians that the majority Chinese will not accept a Singapore Indian as a PM... Singapore has actually regressed when it comes to the Racial relations since the Sixties. This close minded xenophobia will in the long run stymie it’s growth and social stability, if not addressed. You can read some of the stories shared by Singapore minorities on their racist experiences on Insta: @minorityvoices. @lepakconversations
High time that William Gibson does another article on Singapore.
Providing a list of problems that Singapore has with ethnic discrimination – and I don't deny all those problems you've listed are real – doesn't actually answer the comparative question of how Malaysia and Singapore compare in this area.
I think the difference is between a country whose official written policies claim to treat minorities fairly and equally, but which often in practice fails to fully live up to those claims (and Singapore is far from being the only country for which that's true); and a country whose official legislated government policy is to discriminate against ethnic minorities. Can you see how the later is worse than former?
To be honest, Malaysia is probably no better and indeed actually much worse than Singapore in most if noy all areas of comparison. Given the choice between living in either of them, my choice would be neither.
But I suspect that most people prefer Singapore even compared to the rest of the world and I personally think they are falling for the trap personally set for them by the Lee family.
Political pluralism and substantive democracy are definitely one area in which Malaysia appears to have been doing better than Singapore recently, although it remains to be seen whether those developments in Malaysia become permanent or whether it goes back to the old system. This year’s political crisis has not been a positive sign in that department, but it is probably too soon to evaluate its ultimate significance.
While it is true that Malaysia runs an apartheid regime that favours the Malay race (meaning a body of laws that codify preference for civil service jobs, grants, land ownership, certain licenses, language of instruction in school etc etc) as a means to secure the vote of the majority Malays - those philosophical/political differences aren't the reason why Singapore would prefer to purchase solar power from Australia rather than Malaysia.
Electricity generation in Singapore runs on natural gas which are fed from pipelines to fields in Indonesia and Malaysia. LNG ports were developed to create an international supply chain and a solar cable to Australia would be a similar geostrategic/economic strategy of diversification through multiple vendors.
Malaysia has, at any rate, sowed the harvest of their political strategy. The Malay population has crept upwards as a percentage of total population, as Indians and Chinese with any ability have left for Australia and Singapore as popular destinations. This has secured pro-Malay politics as the only way to win an election in Malaysia, but ironically the increased ground means the old monolith pro-Malay party has splintered to fight for control. Today's Malaysia sees several strong pro-Malay parties jostling for power.
Singapore would prefer nobody build a nuclear reactor anywhere near it. Even if a reactor was located 50km away outside of Singapore, any accident could divert shipping lanes away from the Malacca Strait and disrupt air travel that hubs in Singapore. A nuclear reactor strategy for Singapore is like picking pennies before a bulldozer.
> Any engineer would take one look at this and go yep, let's put a nuclear reactor on one or more of Singapore's 64 surrounding islands.
This was actually a plan years ago[1], but they couldn’t identify an island that they found suitable for building/reclamation and which met the 30km setback requirements for a nuclear plant.
And given the number of tsunamis in the region and the specific example of Fukushima it's pretty clear why they don't want to compromise on that requirement.
I'm sure there's political manoeuvring involved, but are you asserting that this will not be economically advantageous to both parties involved in the trade?
> Any engineer would take one look at this and go yep, let's put a nuclear reactor on one or more of Singapore's 64 surrounding islands.
Some engineers might, but it sounds like a very expensive and high risk proposition.
Hmm, trying to think of some recent accidents that involved nuclear fission power plants built close to sea level.
> Singapore could get oodles of solar from Malaysia but they obviously aren't interested in doing that.
Apart from the political complexities, you may find the air pollution and frequency of storms in that region would significantly impact on the oodle volume.
Parts of far north Australia certainly have a wet season, but I suspect if you compared hours of sunlight per year, it'd be well ahead of Malaysia. Latitude seasonal advantages might also be a consideration.
Nuclear power is the safest form of power delivery.
Fukushima is a good lesson, but nuclear power can clearly be engineered to work safely at sea level and below. The US Navy submarine corps has demonstrated it for decades.
Singapore is a technologically advanced society, they could pull it off if they gave it the attention it deserves.
> Singapore is a technologically advanced society, they could pull it off if they gave it the attention it deserves.
There's no evidence that Singapore has not already considered this idea, and subsequently given it precisely the attention it deserves.
I understand that you think it's a grand idea, but the indisputable fact that many technologically advanced societies are eschewing these things may indicate your evaluation criteria is incomplete.
The Japanese Nuclear Commission had the following goals set in 2003:
> The mean value of acute fatality risk by radiation exposure resultant from an accident of a nuclear installation to individuals of the public, who live in the vicinity of the site boundary of the nuclear installation, should not exceed the probability of about 1×10^6 per year (that is, at least 1 per million years)
Their one in a million-year accident occurred about 8 years later.
You can't trust theoretically derived probabilities, such as those used when discussing the safety of the nuclear field for which the effective track record is only 70 years.
"Nuclear: there are two key points to differentiate in the estimates of nuclear energy safety. The first is the period which the studies cover. Analysis by Markandya & Wilkinson (2007) predates the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, and therefore does not include this accident in its estimates. This fact, however, does not fully explain why the two studies differ: we might assume the inclusion of the Fukushima disaster would increase death rates but in fact the estimates of Sovacool et al. (2016) are lower.
"The largest differentiator here is the period which the Sovacool et al. (2016) estimates cover. They report normalized death rates over the limited period from 1990 to 2013. This means the 1986 Chernobyl accident was not included. Sovacool et al. (2016) only include deaths from the Fukushima accident, with 573 attributed deaths. It is useful to note here that not all deaths were a direct result of the accident: for Fukushima, there were no direct deaths from the disaster; one confirmed death from radiation exposure; and the rest noted as premature deaths from evacuation and displacement of populations in the surrounding area."
In addition I see that they are considering deaths only, which for both fossil fuels and nuclear fission is going to skew the numbers in their favour compared to renewable.
Not sure what a complete picture would look like - you'd have to put some $-values against health & QoL impacts, and that's assuming you could accurately do root cause on chronic illness back to a power generation.
In any case, nuclear fission is unlikely to make a resurgence, for any number of reasons.
Your own link says (direct quote): "Modern renewables are about as safe as nuclear energy".
And if you read further you see this:
Let’s again put this into the context of our town of 27,000 EU citizens, who would collectively consume around one terawatt-hour of energy a year. These are the impacts if they got all of their energy from a given source:
Coal: 25 people would die prematurely every year;
...
Nuclear: it would take between 14 and 100 years before someone died;
...
Solar: 53 years before someone died.
Also, the costs of nuclear accidents are generally underestimated:
according to our analysis, with 388 reactors in operation, there is a 50% probability of a Fukushima-like event (or more costly) every 60–150 years, and a Three Mile Island event (or more costly) every 10–20 years.
I had the feeling that there may be reasons not to put a nuclear plant near the equator as you suggest. I had to check but if they were to do this it would be one of the only reactors in the world essentially right on the equator [1]. One of the reasons this might be a bad idea is that many winds and ocean currents are trans-equatorial, so a fall out event would spread radiation across an entire hemisphere. The high levels of water vapour and rain may also cause problems. There is also the frequency of earthquakes, which are high in that region [2].
While earthquakes are frequent in the broader region, Singapore is very seismically stable and sheltered even from tsunamis. For example, the Boxing Day tsunami had zero impact.
It could also be that most countries on the equator are poorer countries that can't afford the cost of a nuclear power plant. The underdevelopment of tropical countries is a well known phenomenon.
At this point, i would consider any engineer who even considers a nuclear power plant within 200km of an inhabited area to be highly irresponsible.
As a species, we have not demonstrated the ability to create engineering organizations that put safety first in design and operations of Nuclear power plants - even the Japanese with their renowned safety culture couldn't do manage it.
Maybe if and when we get intrinsically safe nuclear power plants that demonstrably cannot irridate their surroundings if things go boom, then I'd reconsider but i don't believe there are any of those operational anywhere currently.
Its an economic project rather than a political project. A good percentage of Singapore economy is based on oil. Doing this now and getting experience on it would allow them a leg up on the competition for the future where solar will be even cheaper in the future and more countries start seeing this as an option.
This makes no sense, with Atlassian being involved I'd double down on that statement.
But it's actually very cool. Like sending a person to the moon it pushes science forward. It's not another dumb shove more solar panels on houses idea.
It allows Australia a lot of power over Singapore and the region which is good for them.
I guess the question is what's the side ways difference between NT and Singapore? It's a one and half hour time zone difference. How much peak/off peak/day time advantage do they get with the the different sun times.
Why this over Perth? (I'd guess it's a simple power lines in the ocean is cheaper)
Sorry, I was in-specific, I meant if this is a good idea why not install the infrastructure in country from Darwin east or west to Perth or Cairns over Singapore.
Interesting point - laying cables along a circle of latitude with a 4 hour time difference would mean the peak solar power at one location would power the other locations peak usage (6pm - 9pm). However, a 4 hour time difference is pretty substantial in terms of length of cables. I wonder if Australia could do this between Perth and the South East (Melbourne, Sydney).
There is already interconnects between South Australia and Victoria as part of the NEM [1] that covers the grid along the south and east coasts, along with BassLink to/from Tasmania.
So an overland or sea route from Perth to Adelaide, potentially following the existing rail lines would get you the advantages of the time zone differences as well as integrating Perth into the NEM.
I wonder if a self sustaining solar plant can be set up in a desert with a factory powered by solar energy manufacturing solar panels with the sand and then being installed piece by piece. The stuff that will be needed to be brought from outside will be water (if a lot is needed), aluminum and concrete for the support structure and other metals in the solar panel. Surely a crazy project converting the hypothetical 100 miles x 100 miles square in Nevada or some other desert might be more feasible. It is okay even if this takes 10 years as long as the process is made sustainable to the extent possible.
This seems rather mad compared to just using the existing manufacturing infrastructure; sand is a fairly trivial component compared to all the chemical processing involved, the backing (usually polycarbonate, I think), aluminum frames, glass frontage, indium tin oxide, copper wiring, tin, etc.
Yeah, exactly. I love that video. I wish someone would combine the wind powered sculptures of Theo Jansen with a solar sinterer. Let them roam the sahara and turn it back into solid ground... or buildings and monuments.
Can someone break down some numbers here for me? What kind of voltage do you need to move that distance? Will this create huge magnetic fields along the cable under the ocean? (Yes I know almost nothing about electricity :)
I assume the use high voltage direct current (HVDC) power transmission using coaxial cables. Then the electric and magnetic fields are confined between the inner and outer conductors. The outer conductor basically acts as a shield that prevents electrical fields to escape. The magnetic fields also cancel out each other.
Basslink is a fairly run-of-the-mill HVDC interconnector by world standards at 500 MW and 370 km.
The longest undersea interconnector currently under construction is the North Sea Link between the UK and Norway (700 km, 1400 MW): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Link
At 3700 km, Australia-ASEAN would be far beyond the length of anything that has been built or considered to date!
And Australia already has experience [1] of building that type of link.
And according to your link, Australia's Basslink is owned by the government of Singapore. So that helps explain why they aren't afraid to do this. They've done it before.
I remember a lot of these hig voltage technology needs as insulator sulfurhexaflorid. Unfortunately the most potent greenhouse gas, so lets hope leackage is not too high.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride
If the price estimate is correct, Singapore would be crazy not to do it. The only issue I see is the risk of cable cuts and future geopolitical changes.
Unfortunately, within Australia, coal is currently so cheap that even low-cost solar can't really compete.