Singapore OKs billionaire-backed plan to import Australian green power
Record-breaking plan could meet up to 15% of Singapore's power needs, with power imports crucial to city-state's decarbonisation plans
A billionaire-backed plan to pipe Australian renewable energy to Singapore via an undersea cable has taken another step forward after the city-state handed developer SunCable a conditional approval for the project.
The Singapore government’s Energy Market Authority (EMA) today granted the conditional approval to import 1.75GW of low-carbon electricity, which SunCable said could meet up to 15% of the country’s energy needs.
The plan is to generate solar power in the baking sun of the outback in Australia’s Northern Territory and send it to Singapore via a 5,100km cable – 4,300km of which will run subsea from the port city of Darwin.
Mitesh Patel, Interim CEO of SunCable International, said the announcement is a “vote of confidence in the commercial and technical viability of our project.”
The EMA said the conditional approval recognises that the project can be “technically and commercially viable” based on the proposal.
To keep pace with energy demand, the EMA said it will continue to engage all companies with viable proposals that can contribute to Singapore’s 2050 net zero ambitions.
Next steps for SunCable include showing it meets EMA technical requirements and can deliver a viable power price. The EMA said that SunCable will also need to secure approvals from countries the undersea cable will run through – namely Indonesia.
It would also be the world’s largest interconnector project, with 800km transmission line running from the Australian outback to the northern city of Darwin, which would use 4GW of the power generated.
Low carbon electricity imports are part of Singapore’s overall strategy to decarbonise the power sector, with the city-state having little land to develop its own large scale green power generation. Its EMA is seeking to import around 6GW of low-carbon electricity by 2035.