Back in 2019, we finished an UG project creating a timeline of #HVDC projects 🌎🌍🌏 and also added the what was then the newly proposed 🇦🇺🇸🇬 #suncable project.
This just looked at one aspect (the most technically challenging of all ⁉️) the undersea cable.
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I also wrote a (very short) article for the #VSC #HVDC newsletter that @OfficialUoM Prof. Mike Barnes was editing on the news coming out of Australia
Here are some figures that might help put the #suncable project in context.
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*These are from 2020 when the project was the Australia - Singapore Power Link (ASPL) and part of Yihong Li's UG thesis @eetunsw
1. Cable Length vs Capacity. The 2 🟢at ~1400MW are the ~700km, 515kV & 525 kV 🇬🇧🇩🇰& 🇬🇧🇳🇴projects commonly used as comparison
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2. Rated #solar farm capacity vs area
This was originally announced as 10GW, later revised to 14GW (this figure) and then again up to 20GW since then.
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3. #Battery rated capacity (MW) vs stored #energy (MWh).
There have been quite a few #BESS projects developed since then but all within the bottom left box where all 🟢are.
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In fact, we had to redraw the #BESS part of the project on an log scale in the x-axis to make a bit more sense of it!
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Back on the cable and based on 2021 costs and publicly available information, this provides a rough cost estimate (or at least an indication) for MW-km costs.
*Many of these cables do not go as deep as #suncable and Murraylink is underground, not undersea!
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A lot of commentary focuses on the losses across the cable, which, yes are going to be high in % due to the length, but as such a system would operate continuously and not intermittently, only affect the unit economics of $/MWh delivered in Singapore.
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Instead, here are some other technical challenges that need to be worked out
1. How to operate the #Solar & #BESS at that scale as an island?
2. The #Darwin connection? Does it taper as a multiterminal? Does it convert back to AC and then back to DC?
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3. How do you operate whatever you choose as the option from 2?
4. 🇸🇬 contingency operation? How do you plan for N-1 when one link is 15% of your infeed?
5. #BESS in 🇸🇬?
6. Maintenance and Faults?
6. How do the economics of all of the above stack up?
7. Competing supply?
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Really interesting to see how any and all of the above play out in the next few days / months / years.
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