The Australian government has given the green light to the first stages of what it describes as the country’s “biggest renewable energy project ever” – an ambitious proposal to send energy from a solar farm in the Northern Territory outback to Singapore via subsea cables.
The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said the approval under conservation law of SunCable’s $30bn-plus Australia-Asia Power Link was a “massive step towards making Australia a renewable energy superpower” and that the project would be “economically and socially transformational” for the NT.
Backed by the tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes, SunCable’s proposal includes a huge solar farm on a former pastoral station between Elliot and Tennant Creek, an 800km transmission line to Darwin and 4,300km of underwater cables to deliver electricity to Singapore.
Plibersek said it was “a generation-defining piece of infrastructure”. “It will be the largest solar precinct in the world and heralds Australia as the world leader in green energy,” she said. “It shows that the energy transition is real and it’s happening right now.”
The federal decision was announced three days before an NT election to be held on Saturday. It follows the development being approved by territory Labor government last month.
SunCable Australia’s managing director, Cameron Garnsworthy, said the federal decision was a “vote of confidence” and a “landmark moment in the project’s journey”. He said a final investment decision on whether it went ahead was not expected before 2027, with electricity supply expected to start in the 2030s.
Plibersek said the approved project was expected to generate enough electricity to power 3m homes and support 14,300 jobs at the peak of construction.
She said there were strict conditions to protect nature, including avoiding the greater bilby, which is considered vulnerable to extinction. The bilby is on a list of 21 threatened mammals the government has said it will prioritise for protection.
Some details of the SunCable project have changed since it was announced more than six years ago. The federal government approval allows construction of up to 10 gigawatts of solar and 42 gigawatt-hour of battery storage capacity on a 12,000 hectare site at Powell Creek, an overhead transmission line to Darwin and a cable to the edge of the Australia-Indonesia maritime border.
The company said it was aiming to provide up to 4GW of energy to Darwin and 2GW to Singapore in the project’s first two stages. It was also considering adding a windfarm but that would need separate approval.
SunCable went into voluntary administration last year after billionaire investors Cannon-Brookes and Andrew Forrest, an iron ore magnate now investing in green hydrogen, fell out over its direction. A consortium including Cannon-Brookes’s Grok Ventures and Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners eventually took on the company’s assets, and Forrest left the venture.
The company said its next steps would include ongoing negotiations with traditional owners over Indigenous land use agreements and engaging with authorities in Singapore and Indonesia on its subsea cable plans.
