Cannon-Brookes spotlights Singapore with SunCable solar

Billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes' plan to export clean energy from Australia to Singapore via a 4,200km undersea cable has gained new momentum after taking control of the stalled project.

Cannon-Brookes' Grok Ventures has completed its acquisition of SunCable from the government and is advancing talks with authorities in Singapore and Indonesia, the investment firm said on Thursday. The revised plan envisages the construction of a high-voltage submarine cable manufacturing plant to serve the project and global energy transmission development.

In a statement, Cannon-Brookes said the plan "has all the components that make Australia's next great infrastructure plan possible." "There are huge benefits for Australia and for our neighbours."

In the first phase, a large solar farm in Australia's Northern Territory, which Grok predicts will be the largest in the world, will provide at least 900 megawatts of initial power supply to local industries around Darwin and export 1.7 megawatts of power to Singapore.

The project aims to add a further 3 GW of installed capacity for Australian customers subsequently.

SunCable has been hailed as one of the solutions to help Asia's fossil-fuel-dominated economies, especially those with limited space for solar and wind farms, switch to cleaner sources of electricity. The original developer sees the proposal as part of a potential supergrid spanning Japan and India.

The scheme, which had an early price tag of $30 billion, went into voluntary administration in January after a dispute between Cannon-Brookes and billionaire Andrew Forrest, who was also an investor at the time.

Forrest, an advocate of exporting clean energy such as green hydrogen or ammonia, doesn't think the undersea cable plan is commercially viable.

Cannon-Brookes told reporters at a news conference that SunCable's proposal involved the use of existing technology and the high level of interest from customers in Singapore showed that others thought the strategy could work. "I think this is by far the cheapest way to export significant amounts of energy from Australia at an affordable price," he said.

Cannon-Brookes said Grok plans to file an application for a conditional energy import license with the Energy Market Authority of Singapore this month. Negotiations are under way with Indonesia on the use of its territorial waters for laying cables.

Source: Laser Network