Power cables are getting cheaper and cheaper. The expensive part used to be the voltage conversion stations at the ends, but with mass production of MOSFETs for EV's these have now become far cheaper than the JFET's and other exotic silicon that used to be used.
In turn, that means voltages can be higher, letting one use more of the cheaper PVC or XLPE insulating material and less expensive aluminium for the same amount of energy delivered a large number of kilometers.
To be honest, I don't think we're many decades away from the cable+conversion stations themselves cost being irrelevant, and the administration costs, land purchase costs, etc dominating.
> The expensive part used to be the voltage conversion stations at the ends, but with mass production of MOSFETs for EV's these have now become far cheaper than the JFET's and other exotic silicon that used to be used.
Why do you believe these things are related?
HVDC lines operate in the hundreds-of-kilovolts range. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink operates at 400kV. There are no MOSFETs or JFETs directly involved in stepping down that power.
Semiconductors are stackable to get higher voltage. They're parallelizable for more current.
Cost scales linearly with voltage and current, and is therefore constant WRT to system power.
Thyristors require you have at least one transformer operate at AC line frequency (50/60Hz). That costs a lot, since you need enough steel to store 20 milliseconds of your total power as a magnetic field. Thyristors are on-off devices (like most semiconductors when used for power conversion), but cannot turn off without zero current, which precludes a bunch of high frequency designs which are better for harmonics and weight-of-steel.
Overall, they were a popular choice in the 90's and 2010's, but I don't think we'll see any new designs installed with them.
I've never heard of MOSFETs being used in extra-high voltage systems, but I have not been following the industry for a while. Do you have any links? I've only seen IGBTs or older technology used.
Nah - the insulation material costs ~ $0.80/liter, whereas aluminium conductor costs $6.50/liter.
If you can have the conductor 1mm^2 thinner (capable of carrying less current for the same heat production) and the insulation 1mm^2 thicker (capable of handling a higher voltage) and transfer the same power, then you'd save money.
It only works up to a certain limit obviously - the relationship is non-linear and there is an optimal point.
The actual tradeoff involves a lot more modelling, because you need to consider all kinds of other factors, not just the costs of the conductor and insulator.
The problem with long distance AC is the reactive power component caused by the capacitance, and the voltage rise caused by the Ferranti effect.
The reactive component has significant impact on the generation equipment and grids. It also causes the Ferranti effect, where the voltage along the cable rises. This can make managing the voltage within the cable difficult because at no load, the load end has a higher voltage than the source, and when loaded, the middle of the cable has a higher voltage than both ends.
During stable operation these effects can be managed with Statcoms, shunt reactors and voltage regulation tap changers. However during transient operation you will be relying upon the static protective devices such as surge arrestors, depending on how large the transient is.
DC transmission does not suffer from the same reactive power component and has less losses, but it does require large convertor stations at both ends.
It doesn't seem like anyone directly answered your question. As far as I am aware, all long distance undersea power cables are high voltage DC. I believe this has to do with the efficiency of power transfer over long distances.
AC loses power by inductively and capacitively coupling to nearby objects. It's manageable at medium distances above ground, cheaper than a pair of converter stations. However, water is much more conductive than air and losses from an underwater AC cable would be much greater.
AC is a sine wave, of which the peak is a factor of Sqrt(2) higher than the DC voltage. That means your insulation needs to be sqrt(2) thicker - ie. 41% more insulation material.
On top of that, you also have losses to the cables capacitance with AC.
But DC has the cost of the conversion stations to consider - both capital cost and efficiency causing operational cost.
> But DC has the cost of the conversion stations to consider - both capital cost and efficiency causing operational cost.
I suppose you mean AC-DC conversion stations. Assuming only solar energy will be "pumped" over the wire, then the "only" conversion stations that are needed are at the consumer, right? I said it before, I don't know much about electricity, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
> It’s really difficult to make solid state components that work at million+ volts.
You can split (or add up) the million volts as transmitted at either end so the individual components only work across a small fraction of the 1MV potential difference. This is how can get 12V from 1.5V batteries or use 1V LEDs from a 12V line.
That principle doesn't work as well at high voltages because generally it's a pain for a rack of equipment (such as solar panels) to have a potential between them and ground of 1 million volts.
Yup, high voltage has special challenges because even super tiny leakage currents (which are normal unless extreme precautions are taken) transmit significant power and cause extreme breakdowns rather quickly in most materials.
At very high (million+ volts) we’re talking even quantum tunneling effects producing enough current to cause material breakdowns. It’s pretty nuts.
It’s a big reason why glass and ceramic are so commonly used at those voltages as insulators - they are one of the few materials stable enough and electrically insulating enough to last long term.
Splitting things up like being discussed works when it’s possible to do so without creating even more leakage current paths, which is extremely difficult to do with sizable equipment in the million+ volt range. Folks eventually were able to do so, which is why HVDC eventually became a thing, but it is far from easy or cheap. My understanding is almost all HVDC lines run at lower voltages than their equivalent AC counterparts do as well, due to these technical limitations.
HVDC currently tends to be used for longer runs, where AC inductive losses exceed the equivalent capital costs challenges HVDC has. AC has significant inductive loss issues when run under ground or undersea.
At low voltages, those same leakage currents can’t transmit enough power to damage things or even cause measurable power losses, so don’t matter.
These effects starts being noticable in the > 1kv range, significant in the > 10kv range, quite problematic in the > 100kv range, and very difficult (maybe impossible using known material science in some scenarios) to deal with in the >= 1MV range.
Semiconductors have the added challenge that they often have noticeable leakage currents even in the low voltage ranges (even with specialized designs) and it makes it even harder.
Additionally, Arc faults in DC transmission infrastructure are extremely difficult to control, as unlike AC there is no zero-voltage crossing point (as there is no waveform, in general). So unlike AC, arcs are not likely to self extinguish, and require complete interruption of current flow. Which is actually a really hard problem to solve for several reasons at the power levels involved here.
Amusingly (IMHO), The band's line-up remained the same for 20 years until 2014 when Malcolm retired due to early-onset dementia, from which he died three years later; additionally, Rudd was charged with threatening to kill and possession of methamphetamine and cannabis. Stevie, who replaced Malcolm, debuted on the album Rock or Bust (2014). On the accompanying tour, Slade filled in for Rudd. In 2016, Johnson was advised to stop touring due to worsening hearing loss. So a rocker's fate: forgot what planet they were on, went mad on drugs becoming threats to society, lost their hearing, or kept touring indefinitely with a changing lineup cashing in on past glories.
is there any thing special about the nature of such project that makes you ask this question? By default, long range transmission is always DC for that exact reason.
Aluminium is far less dense, which in turn makes the whole cable bigger, which has other costs (eg. fewer kilometers of cable fit in a boat). Usually it's still the best choice overall though.
> I would have guessed there must be enough domestic customers or in Indonesia that would make more sense.
Australia is a big place. The northern tip of Australia, where this project is based, isn't really that much further from Singapore than from the Australian population centres in the South East of the continent.
Indonesia is much poorer than Singapore, and has awfully inefficient bureaucracy and regulatory environment.
> proposing unrealistic nuclear solutions to seriously focus on renewables.
they're doing unrealistic nuclear proposals, because they know it takes a long time to ramp up, and in the mean time, their buddies' investments in the coal industry gets time to exit and profit properly. It's designed to prevent losses in fossil fuel investments.
Not to mention that australian nuclear cannot be profitable imho - not when solar is so cheap. Their current proposals for nuclear basically requires taxpayer subsidies.
50% of Australia lives in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. Having a nuclear power plant for each would make sense. Melbourne would make the most sense first as it gets a lot less sun than the others.
Meanwhile nuclear is feasible in China, South Korea, maybe in the UK (who are well into sunk cost on their next reactor already), and probably in the US.
My understanding is that I the time it takes to build a nuclear power plant, a helluva lotta solar power generation can be built and up and running and generating power.
And in that time span as well, solar power will increase its efficiency.
And then batteries, to store and deliver that power outside of generation hours, are a parallel to that.
If a nuclear power plant could be built quickly and simply, the equation would be different.
Unfortunately, from the limited amount that I've read, nuclear power plant projects often run over time and over budget, exacerbating the time scale issue I described above.
I don't think that's actually true. US Navy and their contracting shipyards had consistently built nuclear subs in 3 year strides for decades. One set of fuel lasts is good for 1/5th century, after that the sub needs to be cut up and refueled. It's not something that take years after years of permitting and change of plans and suspected acts of arson of unknown motivation if it's literally operated by US Army or Navy(but not NASA).
Solar power is just amateures littering compared to that.
there has been an unfortunate "phase shift" since 1970 in the nuclear energy industry/ecosystem, mostly because the risk engineering principle/mandate called ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable), and of course reasonable does not mean profitable. (which makes sense, we want safe reactors not just "there was a safety budget, and we spent all of it" >>safe<< ones, right? sure, but the real world is stubbornly full of cost-benefit trade-offs, and apparently we crossed it somewhere during the 70s.)
Nuclear is held to a much higher safety standard (eg in terms of deaths per Joule) than any other form of electricity production. And that includes photovoltaic!
Nuclear is so safe--even fully factoring in the accident at Chernobyl--that people very occasionally falling off rooftops when installing solar panels is a bigger health hazard per Joule produced.
Sure, please adjust the numbers for when we had to evacuate cities for nuclear scares. You can do calculations in 'quality adjusted life years' or some other ways to convert deaths and injuries and the cost of evacuations. It doesn't really change any conclusions, even with very pessimistic estimates. I just picked deaths, because they are relatively easy to get clear numbers for.
And don't get me wrong: solar is mostly fine anyway. It's coal that's really obnoxious. Both in the mining and in the burning, and in the accidents. (And to a lesser degree other fossil fuels.)
Photovoltaic is great! On a purely technical level both solar and nuclear can work well, nuclear perhaps a bit better and we had the technology for longer. On a practical level, solar will win, because people fear nuclear.
All electricity generation methods have engineering challenges. Eg solar has some big problems with daily variations and seasonal ones. We can solve the former with batteries, and the latter via big cables to (sub-) tropical regions.
Wind is also great! And we've only just started tapping waves and tides, too. And geothermal.
nuclear safety has changed a lot. even though "walkaway-safe passively cooled" is not a technical term, but that's the design goal nowadays.
the real problem with nuclear is that the market is small, fragmented, US regulations are bad (as I elaborated upthread), so there's no real volume, no economies of scale, no healthy competition and there's basically no innovation even around the safety critical core...
1) The risk of evacuations happening is tiny and I'm not even convinced it is still a factor. We've not yet seen a messy meltdown of any plant designed and built after Chernobyl in 1986 and designs have changed a lot since then.
2) We don't know what a large-scale solar disaster looks like yet, but they might happen. For example I recall the Wikipedia page for the Year Without Summer [0] - we know that sometimes nature puts things in the atmosphere that might hamper solar in a way that nuclear can be designed around. IE, we might find we now have a risk of our power stations just deciding to produce less one year because of a usually unrelated disaster. Or maybe even stop if there is enough volcanic ash.
Plus renewable projects have had a more noticeable association with grid failures and mishaps than nuclear projects. We really don't have much experience with what mass solar failures (if they do exist, but they probably do) look like or how common they are.
People can point it out, no worries. Disasters happen. But it isn't fair to claim that the risks of a nuclear disaster are worse than solar one. We haven't seen what a big solar disaster looks like yet because it has been a serious contender for ~5-10 years and it takes a few decades to figure out what a disaster looks like for any given form of power generation. For solar it could easily be quite bad and impossible to design out.
We have, to date, 0 methods of generating electricity at scale that are free of catastrophic failure modes. Solar will not be free of them either, and we don't really have the data yet to figure out how they compare relevant to nuclear ones (which, on balance, are the mildest of all the tested options!). It could do well, it could do badly, but it is not entirely fair to compare a known low risk in nuclear to an unknown risk in solar.
> So you are kind of referring to mass extinction events. no?
No, I'm not. I included a wiki link to the sort of thing I think could be a problem. It doesn't mention extinction.
It was 1812; they'd barely discovered how to generate electricity. But note that they describe effects like a persistent dry fog dimming sunlight over NA. That would have an effect on solar production and that was half a world away from the eruption.
> The idea of a global darkness for a significant period of time, would be extinction level.
Your scenario not mine; and I don't know why it needs to be global. I'm talking a 12-month period with much less sunshine than normal. A scenario which other sources of power would be independent of but that solar would be very correlated with. Since the nuclear disasters we've seen so far can be escaped by walking away from them slowly, that sort of rare volcanic event influencing solar production would probably be more damaging than a nuclear plant meltdown. It could kill a lot of people.
It is similar to Fukushima where the fact that they had an unsafe nuclear plant that maybe roughly doubled the damage caused by the tsunami that hit Japan. Heavy solar use might do something similar with big volcanic eruptions. We don't really know because we've never tried mass solar use before so it is a bit hard to judge how bad catastrophic failures are vs. nuclear.
Because we have power lines and batteries now, so solar can be where the sun is, and consumption can be where it isn't.
I guess I'm envisioning a future where there is a lot more solar panels than there is consumption, meaning we can store for later or transmit to places that cannot generate themselves.
> or transmit to places that cannot generate themselves
Sticking to the 1812 scenario; that is a substantially harder problem to solve than putting the nuclear plants somewhere extremely remote and moving power to where it is needed. I'm not convinced you're really thinking about the cost-effectiveness of the redundancies you're suggesting here.
I wouldn't say impossible, but I would say there is room here for a solar catastrophe to turn out to be worse than a nuclear one. It is hard to overemphasise how mild the nuclear industry has been so far in terms of harm done - even including the catastrophes. Places like Fukushima apparently have exclusion zone limits of 50 millisieversts per year [0]. That is almost a third of what humans left to their own devices live with when left to their own devices with no local panic [1]. We're talking damage done that is right on the threshold of our ability to even detect it. It won't take that many sigmas of a correlated outage for solar panels to do worse than that.
Storing throughout the day can be done with batteries locally.
Storing throughout the seasons is much harder. (But then, you can probably use a cable to give Germany electricity in winter from solar farms in the Sahara or so.)
How much bigger of a health hazard is manufacturing/installing solar panels compared to nuclear? Let's say, per one terawatt-hour of produced energy, how many people die doing each?
I don't see solar mentioned on this page. And according to data found in a sibling comment, they are practically similar (0.03 nuclear vs 0.02 solar).
Maybe I read it wrong, but I don't see anything supporting the statement: "Nuclear is so safe--even fully factoring in the accident at Chernobyl--that people very occasionally falling off rooftops when installing solar panels is a bigger health hazard per Joule produced."
First you’re going to need reliable worker safety data and population cancer rate data out of China (which makes almost all panels), which…. Good luck.
Silicon Valley is full of cancer causing superfund sites due to improper disposal of chemicals used to produce semiconductors back in the 70’s and 80’s.
Solar panels are semiconductor based (the actual power generating parts are diodes, specifically).
If the chemicals are disposed of properly and workers wear the correct PPE, there are no measurable increases in cancer.
It’s a whole grab bag of chemicals, from TCE, Chromic Acid, Crystalline Silica, etc. etc. 130+ common ones with significant carcinogenic potential.
Thanks for bringing up the concrete example of Silicon Valley's chemicals.
Btw, just to be clear: overall both solar power and nuclear are very good technologies in terms of overall harm done per Joule produced. Much, much better than coal or oil. But we shouldn't pretend that the harm per Joule is literally zero; and we should also be honest about what harm there actually is, and not just what sounds plausible or good.
What is that 'super obvious' link of cancer with nuclear power?
There's lots of dangerous chemicals involved in both the production of solar panels (and semiconductor technology in general) and also in the production of nuclear fuel. And those have to be handled carefully and responsibly, to avoid causing problems like cancer.
Note: I'm deliberately not talking about radiation, because it's basically not a factor. You can live right next to a nuclear power plant, or even work in one, and your radiation exposure will be indistinguishable from background levels. Working as an airplane flight attendant (or even at the top of a really tall building or on a mountain) is much more dangerous in that regard.
Radiation destroys DNA and directly causes cancer. That's the super obvious link. Your deliberate avoidance doesn't change that fact.
Because of this are a bunch of safety protocols in the extraction, transportation, storage and use of radio active materials and their waste products.
100% sure that all of the chemicals involved in Solar manufacture are less toxic to the human body than handling Plutonium. So, we can probably design enough protocols to make it safe to manufacture given we did it for far more toxic materials.
> You can live right next to a nuclear power plant, or even work in one, and your radiation exposure will be indistinguishable from background levels.
So they dug up and replaced all the surface soil around Fukushima for no reason?
Don’t bet on that plutonium toxicity thing. For one, most reactors aren’t going to have any plutonium (or any other radioisotope) where anyone can touch it or interact with it in any way.
Concentrated Hydroflouric acid, and even pure fluorine gas however? That can be an easy turn of a tap away at most semiconductor plants. And much worse. And if you know anything about Florine, ‘much worse’ should be pretty chilling.
I’m honestly not sure if radiation poisoning (actually quite hard and rare to die from) is worse than dying from fluorine exposure (I’m sure it’s killed a lot more people than radiation), but fluorine is certainly going to be faster.
Most fire departments are going to be a lot more concerned about a semiconductor plant than a nuclear one.
But choosing nuclear power doesn't remove our need for semiconductors, so it's a bit weird to attribute that to solar.
The fabrication of of panels is more analogous to fission material mining. As in you are procuring the materials that will produce energy in the future.
If we get rid of nuclear power, we don't need to mine those things anymore. If we get rid of solar panels, we still need semiconductors. So I don't think you can use it for an argument against solar manufacture.
The more semiconductors you make, the more waste chemicals you produce (and use), and the more contamination and cancer you’re going to have if those chemicals aren’t handled correctly. Aka more solar panels, more waste chemicals.
Same with nukes and nuclear waste by running your nuclear plant longer/harder.
90/10 one way will produce a lot of one thing, and less of another - and vice versa.
> 100% sure that all of the chemicals involved in Solar manufacture are less toxic to the human body than handling Plutonium. So, we can probably design enough protocols to make it safe to manufacture given we did it for far more toxic materials.
So?
You have to look at the amount of chemicals required to produce 1 Joule (or perhaps to install one 1 Watt of capacity).
For example, 1 kg of coal is much less dangerous than 1 kg of uranium. But you need much, much more than 1kg of coal to replace 1 kg of uranium.
Similar for solar power: you need to normalise the amount (and 'badness') of waste by the amount of energy produced. Semi-conductor manufacturing isn't exactly like organic farming, you know?
The best example is perhaps hydro-power: 1 kg of fresh water is basically the most harmless substance you can think of. But you need enormous amounts of water to produce reasonable amounts of electricity. And in these huge quantities water can become dangerous.
> > You can live right next to a nuclear power plant, or even work in one, and your radiation exposure will be indistinguishable from background levels.
> So they dug up and replaced all the surface soil around Fukushima for no reason?
Huh? Fukushima was not a normally operating nuclear power plant. Yes, accidents happen. That's why I'm suggesting to look at the impact of accidents per Joule produced (or per Watt of installed capacity, depending on context).
Nuclear power has had only a handful of accidents and lots and lots of Joule produced.
Right so pick a metric that highly favours nuclear because its been around longer.
And ignore common sense that leaving inert rocks in the sun is fundamentally less dangerous than super heating water with highly toxic and unstable materials.
If you can't see your bias here, I don't think I am going to change your mind.
Even by your joule measure, give it time, Solar will beat that too. And even if the largest solar farm in existence started to fail or "not operate normally" we would not have to replace the top soil or bury it in sand for 20,000 years.
> Right so pick a metric that highly favours nuclear because its been around longer.
Huh? It's the opposite! Being around for longer is worse for nuclear for this metric. Nuclear has a small risk of catastrophic failure (especially when used with outdated, bad designs and when operators make careless mistakes). If you only observe nuclear for a short time, say between inception to 1980, or between 1990 to 2010, that metric would look really good, because we got lucky during those times and didn't have any 'jackpots' in the accident lottery.
> And ignore common sense that leaving inert rocks in the sun is fundamentally less dangerous than super heating water with highly toxic and unstable materials.
Huh? What does common sense have to do with anything? We have actual numbers. The realised dangers come not so much from operating already installed solar panels, but mostly from (a) accidents while installing the panels, especially rooftop residential solar, and (b) the chemicals used when producing them.
Overall solar power is very, very safe over its whole life cycle; and that also includes the two dangers listed above.
> Even by your joule measure, give it time, Solar will beat that too. And even if the largest solar farm in existence started to fail or "not operate normally" we would not have to replace the top soil or bury it in sand for 20,000 years.
I don't understand your point. Yes, solar power is pretty neat, I already agree.
But we already have data showing that solar power is more dangerous than nuclear per Joule produced. We roughly know how many people slip and fall off roofs when installing solar panels. (And we have good estimates for how many people died because of nuclear accidents and because of routine operations etc.)
And yes, I agree, that accidents while installing solar panels are a ridiculously small danger per Joule of electricity produced. It's just that both nuclear power and solar power are so safe, that if you insist on making a comparison between the two, these very tiny dangers are what tips the scale.
You could also just be pragmatic and say: both of them are vastly more than 'safe enough' and any difference is pretty close to zero.
I'm fairly sure solar power will 'win' over nuclear. Mostly because it's actually politically possible to install new solar power quickly and cheaply.
Nuclear power plants are unrealistic to build in short time frames, such as trying to meet agreed green energy targets. Part of the Nuclear proposal being put forward by Australian conservatives includes dropping out of the Paris Agreement and refocusing on a 2050 time frame (ie. past the politicians' retirement age)
If we had the renewables to replace the coal politicians would love it to retire in a heartbeat. The reason it’s sticking it around longer is because politicians fear the backlash from blackouts and high prices more than the backlash from the bad PR of delaying closures of coal.
I'm unsure about Indonesia, but domestic customers in that region would be pretty limited. The closest major power users would be in Queensland (>1000km) away.
If Australia refined _all_ of the 40,000kt of Bauxite we export each year into "frozen electricity" Aluminium, that'd only require about 600GWh, or about 4% of the 1.7GW 24x7, or 15,000GWh per year this would send to Singapore.
Large datacenter are in the 100MW sort of range, so only single digit GWh per year.
Australia generates a few hundred TWh per year. 272 TWh in 2021/22 - or 272,000GWh, around 20 times what this project will export to Singapore.
Data centers and Aluminium and Iron smelters are big electricity consumers. But they barely even move the needle compared to cities with millions of households.
Approximating bauxite as pure aluminum oxide [1], 40 million tons of bauxite contains about 21 million tons of aluminum. A ton of aluminum takes about 14 megawatt hours of electricity to produce [2]. That would be about 294,000,000 megawatt hours (294,000 gigawatt hours, or 294 terawatt hours) to turn Australia's bauxite exports into aluminum. Australia could easily double its electricity production/consumption to refine bauxite into aluminum metal instead of exporting the bauxite.
You're off 3 orders of magnitude, 40,000,000,000 kg x 15,000 Wh/kg = 600TWh (you likely tripped on the kt, which is 1000x1000kg, at least I did the first time I ran your numbers). That's not 0.2% of Australia's energy use but 200%.
Ha! It figures. Further down that thread I wrote: "Also, I'm notorious for dropping three orders of magnitude when doing mental math using kilo/mega/giga/tera prefixes."
Turns out when you do the math right, Aluminium _is_ frozen electricity.
Natural resource sales send USD to Australia. AUD is now worth more because it is backed by more USD. Manufactured exports are also traded in USD, so Australian exports become much more expensive because workers and local materials are paid for in AUD.
For that, you'd need to make massive investments in a part of that world that has mostly untouched nature.
It might or might not be a good idea. But you need to then compare those massive investments to the relatively modest investment of the power cable to bring the electricity to a part of that world that already has all the other infrastructure needed, and also already has lots of water.
Singapore has no strategic depth anyway, becoming dependent on importing power isn't some extra vunerable vector vs building domestic generation that likely can't be protected long term. Current is Singapore military vs region is like PRC:TW in the 90s... back then TW with US equipment was one of the more potent forces in the region and could stomp far larger/poorer countries with inferior hardware. But advanced equipment can only scale so far vs quantity, and as rest of ASEAN gets wealthier they're going to build out more modern capabilties, at scales that rich but small Singapore won't have the resources to defend against. If anything integration with AU, with military infra (and future US B21s) is probably more secure / geopolitical hedge against other's meddling.
While Singapore is a surprisingly martial country, if they get into a war with anyone in SEA they're running a very real risk of being destroyed. Indonesia alone has 5x their GDP and 20x their population. There isn't much difficulty choosing which city to target first when going up against Singapore either.
In Singapore's situation, they can probably invest assuming that they are not in a military conflict with anyone. If they get into a war with anyone who can cut that cable they will be returning to the stone age anyway. If Indonesia objects to them they will go, if someone with the power to coerce Indonesia objects to them they're in deep trouble.
> While Singapore is a surprisingly martial country, if they get into a war with anyone in SEA they're running a very real risk of being destroyed. Indonesia alone has 5x their GDP and 20x their population.
Wikipedia gives an estimate of $1.47 trillion for Indonesia's GDP in 2024. The estimate for Singapore is $525.228 billion. The factor seems to be less than 3x. Where do you get 5x from? Are you going by PPP or so?
> In Singapore's situation, they can probably invest assuming that they are not in a military conflict with anyone. If they get into a war with anyone who can cut that cable they will be returning to the stone age anyway. If Indonesia objects to them they will go, if someone with the power to coerce Indonesia objects to them they're in deep trouble.
You can't make those assumptions, if you don't want to be bullied. Singapore doesn't have that cable right now and we ain't in the stone age. That situation ain't no different from having a cable, but it being cut.
I was looking at the PPP figures. By accident as it happens, I was looking at the first box in Wikipedia with "GDP" in it. But I think that is still fine in this context.
> You can't make those assumptions, if you don't want to be bullied. Singapore doesn't have that cable right now and we ain't in the stone age.
You aren't at war either as far as I know, and hopefully it stays that way. But if Singapore happens to be at war with someone who thinks cutting that cable is a good option then the stone age beckons. And not because of the cable.
Yeah - from a purely technical point of view it seems strange that you'd run a power cable 2000 miles to Singapore to service 4 million people, running alongside the coast of Bali, Java and Sumatra - population 210 million.
Presumably those in Singapore have a lot more buying power though. And the politics are more favourable for big capital investment projects.
Yeah, they also have zero room left so I guess the option was between more dirty power stations in Malaysia or this. Seems like a wise, forward-looking initiative.
Singapore has plenty of room left, and we are making more via land reclamation. The question is just one of opportunity costs: what else could you do with the land?
I'm pretty ignorant about Singapore, but... I get the impression it's quite small. Wikipedia says 750 sq km.
The solar farm powering this Suncable project is 12,000 hectares, or 120 sq km. So the solar farm is 1/6th the size of Singapore. Although Singapore is only planning to buy around 1/3rd of the capacity, so maybe this'd be equivalent to only 40 sq km, or 1/20th the size of Singapore.
I suspect there are more profitable uses to the Singapore economy for land reclamation than dropping solar panels on it?
The vast majority of Singaporeans live in apartments they own, and don't pay rent. However you are right that most of these apartments were built by an arm of the government, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_and_Development_Board
There are grants for lower income people to make it easier for them to buy a home. Some people also rent directly from the government, but that's the exception. Most own.
Housing ain't cheap in Singapore. Whether you measure that in terms of rent, or in terms of monthly mortgage costs, or in terms of the opportunity cost of capital (for those who own their homes outright). As everywhere else in the world that's mostly a function of supply and demand, and where that supply comes from (public, private, etc) doesn't really matter too much.
Singapore has been building a lot of housing, and is still building a lot of housing. Both by public and private developers. But we are living on a small island with lots of people, and thanks mostly to immigration our population is still growing. (I myself am an immigrant here.)
No one applies economic cost benefit analysis to buy a Louis Vuitton bag for $50,000. Prestige, signalling, membership to exclusive club, etc dominate the consideration.
Reserves are cash in hand and represent immediate and hard spending power.
> Prestige, signalling, membership to exclusive club, etc dominate the consideration.
So? These _benefits_ also fit into a bog standard cost/benefit analysis. For example, Singapore would need to weight this project against buying everyone a luxury handbag..
Btw, in any case keep in mind that the project is privately financed and will make money selling electricity to Singaporeans. The electrons that power my gadgets at home don't have any colour, so I can't even tell if my electricity comes from a particularly prestigious source. It's all intermediated by the wholesale market.
> Reserves are cash in hand and represent immediate and hard spending power.
That's about on the same level as arguing that having a money printing press represents raw spending power.
Most central banks around the world conduct monetary policy via domestic interest rates and affect these interest rates by buying and selling domestic government bonds. Thus they will have lots of government bonds on their balance sheet. But it doesn't mean that they can just take these bonds and use them to buy solar farms.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore is (almost?) unique in foregoing interest rate as a channel of monetary policy, and instead working via the foreign exchange rate. They affect the foreign exchange rate by buying foreign currencies via freshly minted Singapore dollars (or selling them to remove Singapore dollars from the market).
And just like the American Fed keeps the government bonds they buy on their balance sheet (and pretty much has to!), our Monetary Authority of Singapore keeps the foreign currency on the balance sheet, and they show up as reserves.
By design, Singapore has at least as much in foreign exchange reserves as we issued domestic currency.
In a sense, most of the eg Euros in our reserves are already 'spent', but they are spent in the form of SGD in circulation. (I say 'most', because we have more reserves than we issued SGD. Singapore is cautious like that.)
Indonesia is ~ 17 thousand islands, many steep equatorial jungled volcanic slopes and at 275.5 million is the fourth highest population for a country globally.
Land is in tight demand with food a priority over panels and issues that may not be apparent (clear slopes leads to instability, and keeping them clear is a Sisyphean task, etc).
I do not believe that we can design a system that will withstand waves and wind from tropical monsoons or even most tropical storms or cyclones in the pacific. I can't speak for other oceans or areas of the world, but I believe that this design requirement will probably make it a non starter.
> The approval paves the way for the next phase of development to deliver industrial-scale electricity to customers. But it still has some way to go, with a final investment decision not expected until 2027.
and
> However, SunCable still needs to negotiate Indigenous land use agreements with a number of different traditional owner groups along the transmission line route to Darwin.
I would have guessed there must be enough domestic customers or in Indonesia that would make more sense.