Plan to cable Australian sunshine to Singapore gets green light

The world's largest renewable energy and transmission project has received key approval from government officials. The Australia-Asia Power Link project will send Australian solar power to Singapore via 4,300 kilometer-long undersea cables.

The AAPowerLink project is being led by SunCable, and will start by constructing a mammoth solar farm in Australia's Northern Territory to transmit around-the-clock clean power to Darwin, and also export "reliable, cost-competitive renewable energy" to Singapore.

The principal environmental approval recently obtained from the Northern Territory Government rubber stamps the building of a solar farm at Powell Creek with a clean energy generation capacity of up to 10 gigawatts, plus utility scale onsite storage. It also green lights an 800-km (~500-mile) overhead transmission line between the solar precinct and Murrumujuk near Darwin.

A converter facility will convert electricity from high-voltage direct current to high-voltage alternating current to supply Darwin – with the setup expected to supply "up to 4GW of 24/7 green electricity to green industrial customers." This will be rolled out over two stages, the first delivering 900 megawatts, and then second adding a further 3 gigawatts.