Georgios Konstantinou Profile picture
Jan 13, 2023 β€’ 11 tweets β€’ 7 min read β€’ Read on X
Back in 2019, we finished an UG project creating a timeline of #HVDC projects 🌎🌍🌏 and also added the what was then the newly proposed πŸ‡¦πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΈπŸ‡¬ #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 πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§πŸ‡©πŸ‡°& πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§πŸ‡³πŸ‡΄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. πŸ‡ΈπŸ‡¬ contingency operation? How do you plan for N-1 when one link is 15% of your infeed?
5. #BESS in πŸ‡ΈπŸ‡¬?
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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More from @GeoKonstantinou

Aug 27, 2019
OK, most of the following is textbook stuff on #HVDC but just a quick reference for what a "low-voltage metallic return" - the faulty part of #Basslink - is used.
Basslink is a monopolar HVDC system and the original design was based on an earth return. This is quite typical of monopolar #HVDC systems as it reduces cost (requires only one cable) and losses (again because of one cable)

ptd.siemens.de/IEE_HVDC_0306.…
The reasons #Basslink was eventually designed with a metallic return were mostly environmental (see link above) to avoid

"- Corrosion of long metallic structures
- Electrolysis effects of sea electrodes
- Electric and magnetic field effects"
Read 7 tweets
Aug 21, 2019
Reading through @OtherProfGreen summary of the 9th August #UK event, the similarities to the 25th August 2018 #Australian separation event across the #NEM are very interesting to observe.
Firstly, they are all attributed to lightning strikes.

And although the #UK one was easy to identify, the #QLD one took a bit of forensic investigation as it happened at a time that no weather warnings were out for the area.
Both events attribute an initial loss of generation due to disconnection of #distributed #generation #DG

I will get back to this point later, because it is probably the most interesting aspect of both events!!
Read 11 tweets

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