At $4M per km, a 4,300 km HVDC cable would cost a staggering $17.2 billion to import 1.75 GW of energy. Interestingly, building a Shin-Kori equivalent nuclear plant [1],[2] on a nearby island [3] would be significantly cheaper. If they can afford such a cable, it raises the question of whether it's even the best solution in the first place. [4]
I could easily imagine them doing this, and another similar one to India or twice as far to Kenya, and getting a decent amount of PV at night as a consequence.
(OTOH, as I'm not a grid or marine engineer, I am ready to be mocked for suggesting an underwater cable may last a century).
1) That is a pretty huge cost when wholesale cost of solar is only a few cents to begin with.
2) That equation ignores the time value of money, which is absolutely relevant. A dollar spent today is not the same as a dollar saved 100 years from now.
But it seems unlikely that this kind of private capital would be available for such a nuclear project. Nor would the expertise or industrial capacity be the same.
>> getting a decent amount of PV at night as a consequence.
Ring the equator with solar panels and then run cables north/south to wherever it is needed, providing consistent supply 24/7. It works well enough in Dyson Sphere Program.
Sure, if you can push infinite power through a wire with zero losses. Doesn't work so well with reality constraints.
I've never played DSP but I'm thinking of Factorio. Night falls equally across the world so you have to provide power from somewhere else at night or let your stuff go dark (which can actually be sane--I've put up radars with solar without any backup--it will show you the spread of the nests fine.) You have to start with burning wood or coal for power, solar comes before adequate storage. Thus if you go the solar route there's a range where you have solar, some storage and some steam. Unfortunately, while the game correctly prioritizes solar over steam it puts steam over storage. Thus the efficient approach is to put your steam behind a switch that keeps it isolated until your storage drops low enough. I've had a couple hundred megawatts flowing through one of the starter tech poles--it doesn't melt?!
Only takes a few hundred billion USD of aluminium for that ring to have a cross section of a square meter, which is enough to lower the resistance to 1 Ω.
Of course, only China actually produces enough aluminium for this, and you'd want to divide it between several cables both for redundancy and because putting 2 TW though one cable at any plausible voltage will give it a surface magnetic field strong enough to prevent most tools working on it, and the political issues are going to be huge, but on paper it's fine.
There are many alternatives, but I have a 10kWh LiFePO4 pack that is sufficient for my house 95% of the time.
There have been great strides recently in battery recycling and new chemistries. Not to mention alternatives to batteries.
To me this seems like one of those problems that seems impossible until the economics start driving innovation. I think we are heading in the right direction.
I don't know if anyone would mock you, but no, it won't last 100 years. Not without a whole lot of work and a lot of things going exactly right for a hundred years.
Also, why, on earth, would anyone in Kenya need solar energy from Australia? It has some of the best wind resources on the planet in the Rift Valley alone. Not to mention its own ridiculously high levels of solar available. And all that before we've even talked about the expense and difficulty of laying such a line. Add in unparalleled mineral availability in Africa and the Chinese building out manufacturing in Kenya. (Heck, all over the EAC actually.) I just have a hard time even seeing storage batteries as much of a problem for Kenya in the near future.
You need places like Singapore. Where the resources are unequal to the need for this whole thing to make sense.
There are nuclear power plants today in operation for 70 years, and whose life can be further extended. Considering our knowledge and safety today, it's not improbable that a nuclear power plant constructed today would last a century too, with regular maintenance.
The strangest part of this is that the cable will be run to Darwin, which isn't connected to Australia's national grid.
So the city's electrical grid will be connected to a foreign country 4,300km away before it's connected to the Australian grid (approx. 2,100km away by road).
Do you have a reference for that $17.2 billion cost? I've seen figures between 24-30 billion USD for the whole project -- solar farm, batteries, local infrastructure to supply Darwin and the subsea cable to Singapore. That would make the economics of this look merely stupid rather than insane.
Sudong Island is fairly important for the Singaporean Armed Forces as a forward landing strip for the SCS. In fact, the SAF is in the process of expanding the military presence and use of Sudong Island [0]
Lazarus would be a horrible place for that kind of thing. It would destroy a nice, relatively untouched spot of nature that’s got a lot of biodiversity.
Singapore does use islands for this kind of thing, but this would be better placed on Jurong Island (which is already entirely industrial) or perhaps Pulau Tekong (which is currently for military use only). Alternatively, land reclamation is not unknown to Singapore, and there’s already big land reclamation plans underway in the coming years.
> they do not use liquid sodium. They are PWRs. Rickover would spin in his grave.
Except for the early days of the (one-off) USS Seawolf, before its liquid-sodium reactor was replaced by a LWR. But yes, the KOG would surely come roaring out of his coffin screaming, "WTF are you idiots doing — wasn't once enough?"
Forget about the nuclear plant, the interesting thing here is geopolitics.
Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia back in the day straight up. The US equivalent would be "Hey Detroit, you're a mess, you're no longer part of the US, you're now the city state of Detroit"
So that means pragmatically Malaysia is about as far away as New Jersey from New York City (i.e. very close by). They're this more western gem completely surrounded on all sides by Muslim countries e.g. Indonesia as well. And now drawing this loooonnnggg power line past all these places to the Aussies.
Clearly the geopolitical pressure must be massive if they are spending this vast sum, which COULD BE much less, just to bypass all the neighbors. Not that the US understands Singapore geopolitics very well - whenever a Singaporean such as the tik tok CEO is hauled in front of congress they get grilled on which part of China they're from.
I realize I have next to no understanding on how long distance energy transport works.
How does one transport energy over such a long distance ? Wouldn't there be massive loss in form of heat due to the fact that cables are not perfect conductor ? I kinda understand that normal cables goes around this by having high-voltage (and needing a transformer to step down the volage for home usage - much safer!), but I assume this is only good for 100s of km. Does that scale up to thousands of km ? Or do they assume that Australia is so energy rich that it doesn't matter if there are big losses ?
Can we do the same in Europe and put massive solar panels in the desert of North Africa and import the energy northwards ? (I realize this is a super naive approach, and the main problem is energy storage rather than generation)
which is not the "regular" AC multiphase power transmission. There are existing HVDC links in Europe to join various unsync'd parts of the European grid and its good for quite long legs between stations (there will be a few between Australia and Singapore).
Yes, there's also an aspect that Northern Australia has so much open space and sunshine that transmission losses can be sustained ans still turn a profit.
Browsing other Wikipedia articles let me know that one of the longest existing HVDC is the Rio Madeira HVDC system[1] at 2375 km, and the longest underwater HDVC is the North Sea Link [2] at 720 km
So while the Singaporian-Australian link still feel monumental it's not as science-fictiony as I initially thought.
> How does one transport energy over such a long distance ? Wouldn't there be massive loss in form of heat due to the fact that cables are not perfect conductor ?
Losses in power transmission are a function of the current (P = I^2 R; power dissipated = current squared multiplied by cable resistance). Using a thicker cable reduces its resistance, lowering losses. HVDC transmits power at -- as its name implies -- a much higher voltage; increasing the voltage means you need to draw less current in order to consume the same amount of power, lowering losses again.
It's why electrical grid transmission networks within countries run at a couple hundred kV. The UK uses 275kV and 400kV for transmission for example, stepping it down to 33kV and 11kV at substations, before it is finally stepped down to 230V for light commercial and residential consumption.
You are describing what happens with thermal losses, which as you say can be addressed by running up the voltage. But corona loss goes entirely at voltage and will come to dominate if you try kicking the voltage too much above current levels.
Unlike European supergrid there are not many news about this project. And given that last mention was in 2013 and completion date is set for 2020-2025, it looks abandoned.
If anything, covering a decent chunk of the Sahara with solar panels may be the only thing capable of stopping or at least reducing the speed of desertification. It's a virtually dead "eco"system anyway, it can't be fucked up more than it already is.
The desert is still a living ecosystem, that was my point. And quite a pristine one. I guess not anymore, because we need to “save” nature by destroying the few bits of pristine nature we still have left.
> It's a virtually dead "eco"system anyway, it can't be fucked up more than it already is.
"Depending on voltage level and construction details, HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km (620 mi), about 50% less than AC (6.7%) lines at the same voltage." [1]
Over such long distance, the issue with AC wouldn't be losses but the absurd capacitance of such a long line. That would basically mean you'd need a compensation station every few 100s of kms, which doesn't work very well when you're in the middle of the sea.
One proposal is to link the UK to Morocco, which would supply up to 8% of the UK's electricity consumption with a single project. The site would generate 24/7 clean power by a combination of predictable sunshine, predictable wind patterns, and the remainder by batteries.
From reading about the project, it seems the biggest hurdle by far is getting the lengthy cable built. The project is forced to figure out the manufacturing of it's own cable, as there doesn't seem to be enough global capacity to provide it to them externally.
The Moore-like downward costs of solar panels and battery backup killed satellite mounted panels, worldwide grids with cables across Pacific and Atlantic oceans, mechanical trackers etc. Seems Singapore is an outlier.
From what I understand Singapore is also connected into a larger Asian grid, albeit mostly running on fossil fuels currently.
So this has extra impact also, as once they unlock Singapore, they could potentially start to push renewables into much more of the grid. So yeah a big deal if they can pull it off, hope they do.
> Can we do the same in Europe and put massive solar panels in the desert of North Africa and import the energy northwards ? (I realize this is a super naive approach, and the main problem is energy storage rather than generation)
You have to go DC for long distance
(~lambda/4)
power line transmission: the closer you get to that conductor length, the more power will be radiated away.
Given how many undersea gas pipelines, fiber-optic cables, etc. have been damaged in recent years, this seems too risky. Even if Singapore had a huge navy (it doesn't) keeping all the "accidental" anchor-draggers and sabotage submarines away from 4,300km of cable would be an impossible task.
Seems complicated, land neighbor would be only Malaysia right? By water, Indonesia?
Vietnam is close but already under heavy growth, not sure they have any reasonable landmass or supply of electricity. Not as familiar with Thailand but would be surprised.
All of those above players could be wild cards. Australia is massive and I am making this up but like 95% of it is empty. Perhaps solar could be so incredible cheap that the transmission cost is bearable.
Australia is risky because as a member of AUKUS they are likely to be a combatant in the anticipated war between America/Taiwan aligned countries and China. This puts Singapore's power supply in the crosshairs.
Eh, Singapore is a bridge country for China to western markets. And is 80% ethnic Chinese.
At the point random power plants in the Australian Outback are being bombed to get to Singapore, Singapore has gotten so fucked already they can’t stand.
The question assumes I expect someone to cut a power cable between Australia and Singapore.
I don't.
In the event of Chinese move on Taiwan then if Tom Cotton & Co. have decision making power then it's possible but unlikely they'd be dumb enough to think perturbing grid power in Singapore might exert pressure on China .. but honestly, who'd actually be that silly?
It doesn't have to be the expected outcome to be a threat worth considering. Russian Roulette won't kill you five times out of six but that's still considered an extremely high risk.
Im not sure the project makes economic sense even if the power were free.
Typical wholesale contract prices for solar production in the US are on the order of $0.04-0.05/kwh.
If this $17B cable delivers the full 1.75 gigawatts for 12 hours a day for 20 years, the transmission cost alone is $0.055/kwh.
This doesnt even take into account the time value of money, which would radically increase the cost. The line would have to charge $0.30/kwh for transmission to break even with a 5% interest rate. [1]
Singapore likes to have good relations with everyone. Now Australia has an additional reason to be displeased with anyone who attacks Singapore or threatens their electricity.
Singapore also doesn't like any one country to have excess leverage. Many countries supply them with electricity, this adds one more.
Pretty much. Guess it would have been as viable getting electricity from Thailand (one nearby country that could supply it electricity) as it is getting cheaper electricity from Australia + laying the cable.
I do wonder what the politics is that makes this a better deal than, say, Malaysia or Indonesia. Singapore itself is quite close to the equator, and Indonesia spans it.
It's futile to try to objectively analyze the dispute, sure, but it's both doable and reasonable to describe how one side feels when discussing their motivations.
It doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong (or even if anyone is right or wrong). What matters is that that experience disincentivises Singapore from signing contracts with Malaysia if they don't have to.
No, but they chose Australia over the other surrounding countries for geopolitical reasons (related to the above two points I mentioned) best not mentioned in polite company.
The shortest routes between Singapore & Australia seem to go through Indonesia's territorial waters, but there seems to be about 2000 - 3000 km extra involved in order to avoid that.
> Were you aware of the fact that sharks chew through undersea cables that are an integral part of the internet's physical infrastructure? Scientists are unsure why they do it, though they suspect that the electromagnetic fields emitted by high-volume fibre-optic cables may make them look like live prey.
Meanwhile in Australia we suffer frequent brown outs year round and rolling outages in the summer because the majority of the power generated and made available to people is from coal and other unclean sources. https://www.iea.org/countries/australia/energy-mix
Note for anyone coming along - we don't actually experience frequent brownouts or rolling outages here in Australia, compared to almost everywhere else in the world... We have extrememly high grid reliability standards and the grid operator pulls out all the stops when a possible lack of reserve is forecast.
There have been the rare cases of load shedding, usually when thermal generators are unexpectadely offline (one a few years ago was when a coal plant actually blew up).
We really do, they're very common here in Melbourne. Most summers we experience brown outs / load shedding and throughout the year the grid here struggles with changes in load (dimming lights, short-lived UPS activation etc...).
Interesting! May I ask what area you lived in (not due to the power distributor, but the age of the infrastructure in the area). The areas I've had issues are Brunswick, Thornbury and Footscray. Folks at work (we're a bit spread out but mostly Melbourne based) often talk of minor outages etc...
I actually had some electronics fail quite recently after a number of minor outages and speaking with insurance they were saying it's very common in certain areas where the infrastructure is aging or has recently been struck by lightening.
I have noticed the operating voltage in the inner north seems to vary between as low as 217V to 246V, but it's quite frequent you notice the lights dimming in houses round here. I don't think there were any last summer (if you could call it a summer) but usually I'd experience 2-5 (ish) complete outages on hot days, when I spoke to someone in know they said this is normal as they load shed you can experience short outages.
Load shedding is quite rare, I believe the only instance recently in Melbourne was on the 13th of February when several transmission towers carrying the Moorabool-Sydneham 500kV circuits were destroyed in the severe storms that day, and load-shedding was required to keep the system in a secure state.
Outages are almost always due to faults in the local distribution network.
There are 5 different businesses that own and operate the distribution network in different parts of Melbourne (AusNet, Jemena, Citipower, Powercor and United Energy).
AusNet owns & maintains the transmission network in Victoria, but it is under the operational control of AEMO.
Dispatch of generation and FCAS instructions is NEM-wide and the responsibility of AEMO.
Interesting that there are so many different businesses responsible for supplying electricity in Melbourne. This might explain why several people have mentioned having different experiences with the reliability of the grid in Melbourne. In Chicago, Commonwealth Edison is responsible for the entirety of the grid.
It isn't my experience either, having lived in various suburbs in Melbourne since 2012.
Power outages happen, but I've been through maybe half dozen in my time here.
Same with brown outs. Not unheard of but far from common.
Although I spend my days at the office so maybe I miss some things, but equally I get an email if my home UPS activates and that has happened perhaps twice.
I feel like this must be a Melbourne thing. I haven’t experienced any such issues since the 90’s (apart from local lightning strikes causing brief outages).
Can you point to at least 10 different trustworthy sources that show the reliability and quality of power? Specifically in Thornbury, Footscray and Brunswick.
Thanks, NSW resident, I was going to write the same.
The Australian grid is at the forefront %age of renewable energy in the grid. This brings new challenges with it to which the answer is more batteries and more wind and solar.
But the NT (where the cable is running to) isn't connected to the Australian grid (which is effectively the East Coast, SA, and Tasmania), and there are no plans to do so. The Darwin grid is currently ~4-10% renewables depending on the day.
Please check your facts. AEMO and others are tightening the thumb screws on coal plants more and more.
Replacing the rotation mass for frequency stability is another challenge.
In Sydney there’s so much rooftop solar generation that feed-in tariffs for grid connections frequently go negative. Ie: you have to pay the grid to have it take your excess power.
From memory South Australia has had multiple occasions of being 100% powered by renewables with all their fossil generators shut down.
Yeah we definitely have work to do in completing the shift away from coal. The natural gas export contract situation is a shambles which makes it difficult to use for the transition as planned. It’s certainly not doom and gloom, though, and apart from lines getting aced by trees falling during storms, the wall holes are always full of electrons at my place.
The current operating requirements in South Australia mandate around 80MW of gas generation for system strength reasons.
So even on last Saturday when "operational demand" in South Australia reached the ballpark of -200MW (that is, rooftop solar generation was exceeding the demand in the state by 200MW), there was still 80MW of gas in the mix. (The excess was being exported to Victoria).
Even if that is the case, shouldn't a bigger grid make those events less frequent/extreme? It is not a one-way cable afterall and usually those kind of projects want to make money when prices are high (as they should be in a brown-out situation).
Edit: okay, maybe not at the other end of the continent. But then you have an insufficient grid and need to invest in that too.
I'm going to point out to you that insufficient power generation capacity and/or transmission infrastructure, the reasons behind brownouts and blackouts, has nothing to do with "unclean" energy sources.
In fact, if the cause is insufficient generation capacity then renewables will exacerbate it because fossil fuels are much more energy dense and consistent.
A grid set up to handle unreliable sources can deal with unreliable sources. A grid that depends on reliable sources is in trouble when reliable sources go off line.
It may not, but it also disgusts me how much sun we have and how willing we are to see our power off when so much of the country is powered by coal, oil and gas.
At $4M per km, a 4,300 km HVDC cable would cost a staggering $17.2 billion to import 1.75 GW of energy. Interestingly, building a Shin-Kori equivalent nuclear plant [1],[2] on a nearby island [3] would be significantly cheaper. If they can afford such a cable, it raises the question of whether it's even the best solution in the first place. [4]
[1] Aerial view of the plant: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kori+Nuclear+Power+Plant/@...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kori_Nuclear_Power_Plant
[3] Possible location, suitable by size: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lazarus+Island/@1.2057214,...
[4] Singapore is not denying such possibility https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/nuclear-energy-fus...
Depends how long the cable lasts, maintenance costs.
Some of the cables that start forest fires in CA have been there for a century by that point.
Even at 17e9 USD, if this lasts a century, and is in full use for that time, it's adding 1.1¢/kWh to the price of delivery:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.75%20GW%2A100%20years...
I could easily imagine them doing this, and another similar one to India or twice as far to Kenya, and getting a decent amount of PV at night as a consequence.
(OTOH, as I'm not a grid or marine engineer, I am ready to be mocked for suggesting an underwater cable may last a century).
1) That is a pretty huge cost when wholesale cost of solar is only a few cents to begin with.
2) That equation ignores the time value of money, which is absolutely relevant. A dollar spent today is not the same as a dollar saved 100 years from now.
What's the cost of 12,000 hectares of land in Singapore? Since that is the area that the solar farm on the Australian end will take up
Im not saying local solar is an option. I'm saying the cost seems incredibly high.
Roof or otherwise?
And if you have skyscrapers you have lots of side surface area to capture solar energy as well
Is adding side-panels to skyscrapers a solved problem? It doesn’t seem nearly as easy or mature as rooftop or grid-scale PV.
For 1, as this crosses timezones, the cost comparison has to be with storage rather than local generation.
2 is fair.
Mind you that's completely ignoring the opportunity cost of investing that initial cost elsewhere.
But it seems unlikely that this kind of private capital would be available for such a nuclear project. Nor would the expertise or industrial capacity be the same.
>> getting a decent amount of PV at night as a consequence.
Ring the equator with solar panels and then run cables north/south to wherever it is needed, providing consistent supply 24/7. It works well enough in Dyson Sphere Program.
Sure, if you can push infinite power through a wire with zero losses. Doesn't work so well with reality constraints.
I've never played DSP but I'm thinking of Factorio. Night falls equally across the world so you have to provide power from somewhere else at night or let your stuff go dark (which can actually be sane--I've put up radars with solar without any backup--it will show you the spread of the nests fine.) You have to start with burning wood or coal for power, solar comes before adequate storage. Thus if you go the solar route there's a range where you have solar, some storage and some steam. Unfortunately, while the game correctly prioritizes solar over steam it puts steam over storage. Thus the efficient approach is to put your steam behind a switch that keeps it isolated until your storage drops low enough. I've had a couple hundred megawatts flowing through one of the starter tech poles--it doesn't melt?!
Sure, maths says it's fine.
Only takes a few hundred billion USD of aluminium for that ring to have a cross section of a square meter, which is enough to lower the resistance to 1 Ω.
Of course, only China actually produces enough aluminium for this, and you'd want to divide it between several cables both for redundancy and because putting 2 TW though one cable at any plausible voltage will give it a surface magnetic field strong enough to prevent most tools working on it, and the political issues are going to be huge, but on paper it's fine.
I mean, storage might be an easier option ;)
There are many alternatives, but I have a 10kWh LiFePO4 pack that is sufficient for my house 95% of the time.
There have been great strides recently in battery recycling and new chemistries. Not to mention alternatives to batteries.
To me this seems like one of those problems that seems impossible until the economics start driving innovation. I think we are heading in the right direction.
I don't know if anyone would mock you, but no, it won't last 100 years. Not without a whole lot of work and a lot of things going exactly right for a hundred years.
Also, why, on earth, would anyone in Kenya need solar energy from Australia? It has some of the best wind resources on the planet in the Rift Valley alone. Not to mention its own ridiculously high levels of solar available. And all that before we've even talked about the expense and difficulty of laying such a line. Add in unparalleled mineral availability in Africa and the Chinese building out manufacturing in Kenya. (Heck, all over the EAC actually.) I just have a hard time even seeing storage batteries as much of a problem for Kenya in the near future.
You need places like Singapore. Where the resources are unequal to the need for this whole thing to make sense.
> Also, why, on earth, would anyone in Kenya need solar energy from Australia?
Was thinking more that Kenya and Australia would sell electricity to Singapore during Singapore's night.
But Kenya <-> Australia also works, for nighttime coverage.
Wind may be better for each though, I've not looked at that kind of specific.
I'd assume Kenya would also be great for geothermal, having been past (IIRC) Olkaria V in Hell's Gate.
There are nuclear power plants today in operation for 70 years, and whose life can be further extended. Considering our knowledge and safety today, it's not improbable that a nuclear power plant constructed today would last a century too, with regular maintenance.
The strangest part of this is that the cable will be run to Darwin, which isn't connected to Australia's national grid.
So the city's electrical grid will be connected to a foreign country 4,300km away before it's connected to the Australian grid (approx. 2,100km away by road).
Do you have a reference for that $17.2 billion cost? I've seen figures between 24-30 billion USD for the whole project -- solar farm, batteries, local infrastructure to supply Darwin and the subsea cable to Singapore. That would make the economics of this look merely stupid rather than insane.
You can't build a Nuclear Plant on Sudong Island.
Sudong Island is fairly important for the Singaporean Armed Forces as a forward landing strip for the SCS. In fact, the SAF is in the process of expanding the military presence and use of Sudong Island [0]
[0] - https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/more-land-to-be-recla...
Lazarus would be a horrible place for that kind of thing. It would destroy a nice, relatively untouched spot of nature that’s got a lot of biodiversity.
Singapore does use islands for this kind of thing, but this would be better placed on Jurong Island (which is already entirely industrial) or perhaps Pulau Tekong (which is currently for military use only). Alternatively, land reclamation is not unknown to Singapore, and there’s already big land reclamation plans underway in the coming years.
I wonder if anyone other than the Russians makes one of those floating nuclear power plants that can be moored at sea?
The US and France do too, but they call them nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines.
That's a bit different though - those reactors use closed cycle liquid sodium coolant, and are not made for supplying power on shore.
I'm talking about something like this:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/is-the-world-ready-for-floating-nu...
Lol they do not use liquid sodium. They are PWRs. Rickover would spin in his grave.
> they do not use liquid sodium. They are PWRs. Rickover would spin in his grave.
Except for the early days of the (one-off) USS Seawolf, before its liquid-sodium reactor was replaced by a LWR. But yes, the KOG would surely come roaring out of his coffin screaming, "WTF are you idiots doing — wasn't once enough?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Seawolf_(SSN-575)
Thorcon [https://thorconpower.com/] has a plan for this, but they're still years away.
Can't they just float them in the sea? Or does the salt water corrode the panels?
Forget about the nuclear plant, the interesting thing here is geopolitics.
Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia back in the day straight up. The US equivalent would be "Hey Detroit, you're a mess, you're no longer part of the US, you're now the city state of Detroit"
So that means pragmatically Malaysia is about as far away as New Jersey from New York City (i.e. very close by). They're this more western gem completely surrounded on all sides by Muslim countries e.g. Indonesia as well. And now drawing this loooonnnggg power line past all these places to the Aussies.
Clearly the geopolitical pressure must be massive if they are spending this vast sum, which COULD BE much less, just to bypass all the neighbors. Not that the US understands Singapore geopolitics very well - whenever a Singaporean such as the tik tok CEO is hauled in front of congress they get grilled on which part of China they're from.
It would seem to only make sense economically if Australia was paying for the majority of the costs.
I realize I have next to no understanding on how long distance energy transport works.
How does one transport energy over such a long distance ? Wouldn't there be massive loss in form of heat due to the fact that cables are not perfect conductor ? I kinda understand that normal cables goes around this by having high-voltage (and needing a transformer to step down the volage for home usage - much safer!), but I assume this is only good for 100s of km. Does that scale up to thousands of km ? Or do they assume that Australia is so energy rich that it doesn't matter if there are big losses ?
Can we do the same in Europe and put massive solar panels in the desert of North Africa and import the energy northwards ? (I realize this is a super naive approach, and the main problem is energy storage rather than generation)
The starting point for this is High-voltage direct current (HVDC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
which is not the "regular" AC multiphase power transmission. There are existing HVDC links in Europe to join various unsync'd parts of the European grid and its good for quite long legs between stations (there will be a few between Australia and Singapore).
Yes, there's also an aspect that Northern Australia has so much open space and sunshine that transmission losses can be sustained ans still turn a profit.
Neat, thanks !
Browsing other Wikipedia articles let me know that one of the longest existing HVDC is the Rio Madeira HVDC system[1] at 2375 km, and the longest underwater HDVC is the North Sea Link [2] at 720 km
So while the Singaporian-Australian link still feel monumental it's not as science-fictiony as I initially thought.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Madeira_HVDC_system
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Link
> How does one transport energy over such a long distance ? Wouldn't there be massive loss in form of heat due to the fact that cables are not perfect conductor ?
Losses in power transmission are a function of the current (P = I^2 R; power dissipated = current squared multiplied by cable resistance). Using a thicker cable reduces its resistance, lowering losses. HVDC transmits power at -- as its name implies -- a much higher voltage; increasing the voltage means you need to draw less current in order to consume the same amount of power, lowering losses again.
It's why electrical grid transmission networks within countries run at a couple hundred kV. The UK uses 275kV and 400kV for transmission for example, stepping it down to 33kV and 11kV at substations, before it is finally stepped down to 230V for light commercial and residential consumption.
EDIT: A fantastic demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjY31x0m3d8
You are describing what happens with thermal losses, which as you say can be addressed by running up the voltage. But corona loss goes entirely at voltage and will come to dominate if you try kicking the voltage too much above current levels.
> Can we do the same in Europe and put massive solar panels in the desert of North Africa and import the energy northwards ?
Yes, they’re actively working on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medgrid
Unlike European supergrid there are not many news about this project. And given that last mention was in 2013 and completion date is set for 2020-2025, it looks abandoned.
There's another attempt currently in the works:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Po...
There is or also was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec
Is this really still a thing? There hasn't been any news in many years now.
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If anything, covering a decent chunk of the Sahara with solar panels may be the only thing capable of stopping or at least reducing the speed of desertification. It's a virtually dead "eco"system anyway, it can't be fucked up more than it already is.
The desert is still a living ecosystem, that was my point. And quite a pristine one. I guess not anymore, because we need to “save” nature by destroying the few bits of pristine nature we still have left.
> It's a virtually dead "eco"system anyway, it can't be fucked up more than it already is.
That is just wrong on many levels.
> ... it can't be fucked up more than it already is.
Oh, there's probably a bunch of ways to make it worse. ;)
The pro-nuclear crowd is going to want somewhere to dump a bunch of extremely toxic waste. That stuff could probably make it worse. ;)
"Depending on voltage level and construction details, HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km (620 mi), about 50% less than AC (6.7%) lines at the same voltage." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
Over such long distance, the issue with AC wouldn't be losses but the absurd capacitance of such a long line. That would basically mean you'd need a compensation station every few 100s of kms, which doesn't work very well when you're in the middle of the sea.
And note this is exponential. 2,000km costs you 3.5% + 3.5% + 3.5% * 3.5%. By the time you're running wires around a planet that really adds up.
Which Northern African country would you pick that is trustworthy enough to have your economy depend on for energy need over the coming decades?
One proposal is to link the UK to Morocco, which would supply up to 8% of the UK's electricity consumption with a single project. The site would generate 24/7 clean power by a combination of predictable sunshine, predictable wind patterns, and the remainder by batteries.
From reading about the project, it seems the biggest hurdle by far is getting the lengthy cable built. The project is forced to figure out the manufacturing of it's own cable, as there doesn't seem to be enough global capacity to provide it to them externally.
Morocco? If Europeans can stop for 10 minutes whining about democracy and human rights and take a page from China's playbook we can take Africa back.
Oh Europeans shall 'take Africa back' in your opinion?
Wow ok
One that they(EU) don't see bombing or invading
The Moore-like downward costs of solar panels and battery backup killed satellite mounted panels, worldwide grids with cables across Pacific and Atlantic oceans, mechanical trackers etc. Seems Singapore is an outlier.
Singapore is really small and mostly already urban. There's some space for roof-mounting panels but otherwise it's really at a premium.
From what I understand Singapore is also connected into a larger Asian grid, albeit mostly running on fossil fuels currently.
So this has extra impact also, as once they unlock Singapore, they could potentially start to push renewables into much more of the grid. So yeah a big deal if they can pull it off, hope they do.
> Can we do the same in Europe and put massive solar panels in the desert of North Africa and import the energy northwards ? (I realize this is a super naive approach, and the main problem is energy storage rather than generation)
A very good video from Real Engineering explains that no, not really: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o&t=1s
You have to go DC for long distance (~lambda/4) power line transmission: the closer you get to that conductor length, the more power will be radiated away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec comes to mind.
Higher voltage = longer distance. And it's DC so transformers are not involved. Power electronics is used to step the voltage up/down as needed.
>HVDC transmission lines have losses of about 3.5% per 1,000 kilometers, while HVAC lines have losses of about 6.7% at the same voltage.
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With all these ships illegally dragging their anchors and damaging under sea communications, I wonder what would happen if they drag over this.
It could be an enlightening experience for the crew!
From Singapore's perspective it will be just like some truck veering off the road and taking out a power pole and the lines with it.
Given how many undersea gas pipelines, fiber-optic cables, etc. have been damaged in recent years, this seems too risky. Even if Singapore had a huge navy (it doesn't) keeping all the "accidental" anchor-draggers and sabotage submarines away from 4,300km of cable would be an impossible task.
Not sure how this project makes sense economically. Does Singapore have poor relation with all the countries closer to them?
Seems complicated, land neighbor would be only Malaysia right? By water, Indonesia?
Vietnam is close but already under heavy growth, not sure they have any reasonable landmass or supply of electricity. Not as familiar with Thailand but would be surprised.
All of those above players could be wild cards. Australia is massive and I am making this up but like 95% of it is empty. Perhaps solar could be so incredible cheap that the transmission cost is bearable.
Australia is risky because as a member of AUKUS they are likely to be a combatant in the anticipated war between America/Taiwan aligned countries and China. This puts Singapore's power supply in the crosshairs.
Eh, Singapore is a bridge country for China to western markets. And is 80% ethnic Chinese.
At the point random power plants in the Australian Outback are being bombed to get to Singapore, Singapore has gotten so fucked already they can’t stand.
> power plants in the Australian Outback are being bombed
More likely for the cable to be cut. It's easier and has plausible deniability.
Fair point - I’d expect the US would do it before China, Australia, Russia, etc. in this case though.
If the xenophobic Tom Cotton crowd get the upper hand, sure.
O/wise, not so much.
Then who would you expect would do it?
The question assumes I expect someone to cut a power cable between Australia and Singapore.
I don't.
In the event of Chinese move on Taiwan then if Tom Cotton & Co. have decision making power then it's possible but unlikely they'd be dumb enough to think perturbing grid power in Singapore might exert pressure on China .. but honestly, who'd actually be that silly?
It doesn't have to be the expected outcome to be a threat worth considering. Russian Roulette won't kill you five times out of six but that's still considered an extremely high risk.
I think we both agree then.
Welp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVzRLgw2NTc
Your point is?
I think they are anticipating importing extremely cheap solar power from Australia.
Yep. Zero of those "closer" neighbors have umpteen thousand square miles of nearly-uninhabited desert handy, to easily build solar at scale.
Plus - if it worked well enough, Singapore might do a major expansion. And sell start selling solar power to their closer neighbors.
Im not sure the project makes economic sense even if the power were free.
Typical wholesale contract prices for solar production in the US are on the order of $0.04-0.05/kwh.
If this $17B cable delivers the full 1.75 gigawatts for 12 hours a day for 20 years, the transmission cost alone is $0.055/kwh.
This doesnt even take into account the time value of money, which would radically increase the cost. The line would have to charge $0.30/kwh for transmission to break even with a 5% interest rate. [1]
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.75+GW%2F2*20+years%2F...
Singapore likes to have good relations with everyone. Now Australia has an additional reason to be displeased with anyone who attacks Singapore or threatens their electricity.
Singapore also doesn't like any one country to have excess leverage. Many countries supply them with electricity, this adds one more.
> Singapore likes to have good relations with everyone.
Except Malaysia and Indonesia, who are huge and immediate neighbors
Extremely poor.
I bet this was done to diversify sources as opposed to ideam many commenters have as in "just more electricity".
They are also proposing to import from closer countries.
Pretty much. Guess it would have been as viable getting electricity from Thailand (one nearby country that could supply it electricity) as it is getting cheaper electricity from Australia + laying the cable.
I do wonder what the politics is that makes this a better deal than, say, Malaysia or Indonesia. Singapore itself is quite close to the equator, and Indonesia spans it.
Malaysia has a history of signing agreements with Singapore and then stalling or trying renegotiate the terms after the fact.
Any dispute which has a Wikipedia page (like the Malaysia/Singapore water dispute) is:
- Too complicated to assign blame to one party
- Futile to rehash in HN comments
It's futile to try to objectively analyze the dispute, sure, but it's both doable and reasonable to describe how one side feels when discussing their motivations.
It doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong (or even if anyone is right or wrong). What matters is that that experience disincentivises Singapore from signing contracts with Malaysia if they don't have to.
I'm no expert on the project, but I think the argument for Australia is the large tracts of land available for solar panels.
Per the article, Singapore has already approved projects to import electricity from Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
First Projekt online wins.
Perhaps Australia has less clouds?
Middle of Australia has a number of deserts with a dry and arid climate.
Versus Malaysia / Indonesia which is hot and humid.
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What, Australia is the only country with the Sun God to power the panels?
No but Australia has lots of flat arid land where installation is easy. This ticks the box of fast deployment, e.g. 5B modules.
No, but they chose Australia over the other surrounding countries for geopolitical reasons (related to the above two points I mentioned) best not mentioned in polite company.
Which route would such a cable take to Australia?
The shortest routes between Singapore & Australia seem to go through Indonesia's territorial waters, but there seems to be about 2000 - 3000 km extra involved in order to avoid that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_waters_of_Indonesi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link#/med...
Oddly, considering the massive scale of this project, there’s no mention of projected costs in TFA.
A kilometre of undersea HVDC line costs $4mln, or less than half the price of the same length of highway in the EU on average.
It's expensive, but an economy such as Singapore has the means to pull it off.
Here's another article that says it's US$24 billion.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/s-pore-gives-conditio...
A very big attack surface for a simple sub-marine op...
That is giving a lot of geopolitical leverage to Australia. Singapore will soon become hostage to the aussies every whim.
Or to the countries who go and cut these cables with their submarines
That's a monster of a cable. Wow
Imagine the size of the (underwater?) rat that nature will need to evolve to chew on that. ;)
Nature already evolved this type of rat!
> Were you aware of the fact that sharks chew through undersea cables that are an integral part of the internet's physical infrastructure? Scientists are unsure why they do it, though they suspect that the electromagnetic fields emitted by high-volume fibre-optic cables may make them look like live prey.
https://www.diplomacy.edu/blog/can-sharks-eat-the-internet/
Electromagnetic fields? Emitted by fibre-optic cables?
The cables are powered. There are also signal repeaters.
yes, its not just fibre in undersea cables.
Cool. Learn something new every day eh? :)
Is this good for the shark?
Of course.
The matter of the Giant Rat of Sumatra is something for which the world is not yet prepared.
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Single point of failure
Not really. Article indicates this cable will provide about 9% of their total demand.
Meanwhile in Australia we suffer frequent brown outs year round and rolling outages in the summer because the majority of the power generated and made available to people is from coal and other unclean sources. https://www.iea.org/countries/australia/energy-mix
Note for anyone coming along - we don't actually experience frequent brownouts or rolling outages here in Australia, compared to almost everywhere else in the world... We have extrememly high grid reliability standards and the grid operator pulls out all the stops when a possible lack of reserve is forecast.
There have been the rare cases of load shedding, usually when thermal generators are unexpectadely offline (one a few years ago was when a coal plant actually blew up).
We really do, they're very common here in Melbourne. Most summers we experience brown outs / load shedding and throughout the year the grid here struggles with changes in load (dimming lights, short-lived UPS activation etc...).
I live in Melbourne (on Jemena’s distribution network) and this isn’t my experience.
Our power is very reliable and rarely goes out. Every few years a car hits a pole or something and we get a brief period of quiet time
Interesting! May I ask what area you lived in (not due to the power distributor, but the age of the infrastructure in the area). The areas I've had issues are Brunswick, Thornbury and Footscray. Folks at work (we're a bit spread out but mostly Melbourne based) often talk of minor outages etc...
I actually had some electronics fail quite recently after a number of minor outages and speaking with insurance they were saying it's very common in certain areas where the infrastructure is aging or has recently been struck by lightening.
I have noticed the operating voltage in the inner north seems to vary between as low as 217V to 246V, but it's quite frequent you notice the lights dimming in houses round here. I don't think there were any last summer (if you could call it a summer) but usually I'd experience 2-5 (ish) complete outages on hot days, when I spoke to someone in know they said this is normal as they load shed you can experience short outages.
Load shedding is quite rare, I believe the only instance recently in Melbourne was on the 13th of February when several transmission towers carrying the Moorabool-Sydneham 500kV circuits were destroyed in the severe storms that day, and load-shedding was required to keep the system in a secure state.
Outages are almost always due to faults in the local distribution network.
Who's operating the grid in Melbourne?
There are 5 different businesses that own and operate the distribution network in different parts of Melbourne (AusNet, Jemena, Citipower, Powercor and United Energy).
AusNet owns & maintains the transmission network in Victoria, but it is under the operational control of AEMO.
Dispatch of generation and FCAS instructions is NEM-wide and the responsibility of AEMO.
Interesting that there are so many different businesses responsible for supplying electricity in Melbourne. This might explain why several people have mentioned having different experiences with the reliability of the grid in Melbourne. In Chicago, Commonwealth Edison is responsible for the entirety of the grid.
That wasn't my experience when living in Melbourne, though I moved away in 2022.
It isn't my experience either, having lived in various suburbs in Melbourne since 2012.
Power outages happen, but I've been through maybe half dozen in my time here.
Same with brown outs. Not unheard of but far from common.
Although I spend my days at the office so maybe I miss some things, but equally I get an email if my home UPS activates and that has happened perhaps twice.
I feel like this must be a Melbourne thing. I haven’t experienced any such issues since the 90’s (apart from local lightning strikes causing brief outages).
Can you point to at least 10 different trustworthy sources about this?
Can you point to at least 10 different trustworthy sources that show the reliability and quality of power? Specifically in Thornbury, Footscray and Brunswick.
Thanks, NSW resident, I was going to write the same.
The Australian grid is at the forefront %age of renewable energy in the grid. This brings new challenges with it to which the answer is more batteries and more wind and solar.
But the NT (where the cable is running to) isn't connected to the Australian grid (which is effectively the East Coast, SA, and Tasmania), and there are no plans to do so. The Darwin grid is currently ~4-10% renewables depending on the day.
~4-10% ! Jesus that's bad!
> when a coal plant actually blew up
Is that when entire states power (2gw) went from being produced to being consumed as a massive electric motor to 50k rpm and shooting into sky?
Yes, that one! They made a whole video about how it happened:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vbLvjFohK9g&pp=ygUJQ2FsbGlkZSBj
You also pay extremely high prices for electricity because the big coal plant operators are in bed with the government
Please check your facts. AEMO and others are tightening the thumb screws on coal plants more and more. Replacing the rotation mass for frequency stability is another challenge.
No outages like that here in Perth either.
Which part of Australia are you actually in where that's happening?
Doesn't seem like a thing in at least the capital cities.
It's been a problem here in Melbourne for at least the last 8-10~ years.
The large issues (not the local failure) are listed at https://www.aemo.com.au/market-notices?marketNoticeQuery=&fr...
It's very rare to see the load shedding applied/recommended. Are you sure it's not just the local part of the grid being crap?
That's weird.
When I was living in Melbourne (inner western and eastern suburbs) from roughly 2019 through to 2022 it wasn't.
In Sydney there’s so much rooftop solar generation that feed-in tariffs for grid connections frequently go negative. Ie: you have to pay the grid to have it take your excess power.
From memory South Australia has had multiple occasions of being 100% powered by renewables with all their fossil generators shut down.
Yeah we definitely have work to do in completing the shift away from coal. The natural gas export contract situation is a shambles which makes it difficult to use for the transition as planned. It’s certainly not doom and gloom, though, and apart from lines getting aced by trees falling during storms, the wall holes are always full of electrons at my place.
The current operating requirements in South Australia mandate around 80MW of gas generation for system strength reasons.
So even on last Saturday when "operational demand" in South Australia reached the ballpark of -200MW (that is, rooftop solar generation was exceeding the demand in the state by 200MW), there was still 80MW of gas in the mix. (The excess was being exported to Victoria).
Even if that is the case, shouldn't a bigger grid make those events less frequent/extreme? It is not a one-way cable afterall and usually those kind of projects want to make money when prices are high (as they should be in a brown-out situation).
Edit: okay, maybe not at the other end of the continent. But then you have an insufficient grid and need to invest in that too.
I'm going to point out to you that insufficient power generation capacity and/or transmission infrastructure, the reasons behind brownouts and blackouts, has nothing to do with "unclean" energy sources.
In fact, if the cause is insufficient generation capacity then renewables will exacerbate it because fossil fuels are much more energy dense and consistent.
A grid set up to handle unreliable sources can deal with unreliable sources. A grid that depends on reliable sources is in trouble when reliable sources go off line.
It may not, but it also disgusts me how much sun we have and how willing we are to see our power off when so much of the country is powered by coal, oil and gas.