In the weekly column we take turns writing about innovation and economic trends in Asia.
(Photo: Klawe Rzeczy)
Bangkok It’s an idea that’s been around for as long as solar panels have been hanging on roofs: Why not just build giant solar power plants in the desert, where the sun almost always shines, and then send the power from there to the chronically cloudy metropolitan areas in the north?
The German physicist Gerhard Knies was already widely promoting this idea at the beginning of the millennium: he showed a world map with a comparatively tiny red square that he superimposed over part of the Sahara. If you were to cover this area there, which should probably be about the size of Bavaria, with solar cells, you could cover the global demand for electricity, he explained.
The Desertec initiative emerged from Knies’ vision, with which companies such as Siemens, RWE and Eon wanted to generate huge amounts of desert electricity and thus supply both North Africa and Europe. However, the ambitious concept has not yet become reality. Costs and technological hurdles have long been too high to actually transmit solar energy thousands of kilometers from the equator to its destination.
But two decades after the first proposals for the Sahara project, the idea could now become reality on the other side of the world: According to the plans of private investors and authorities, the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore could soon obtain a significant part of its electricity from solar power plants in faraway Australia .
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The project, called the Australia-Asia Power Link, is intended to connect the financial metropolis of five and a half million people to northern Australia via a 4,200-kilometer cable, most of which runs through the sea.
12,000 hectares of solar panels with a maximum output of 17 to 20 gigawatts are planned there. In the future, they should be able to cover 15 percent of Singapore’s electricity needs, according to the Singaporean company Sun Cable, which is responsible for the initiative. Singapore could not only make its energy supply more environmentally friendly, but also diversify it: to date, 95 percent of the country’s electricity comes from gas-fired power plants.
Extensive support from the authorities
The plan is backed by wealthy financiers such as Australian billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Andrew Forrest. The latter is in the process of converting its mining company Fortescue Metals Group into a renewable energy conglomerate and wants, among other things, to supply Germany with green hydrogen. The initiators want to spend around 22 billion US dollars on the solar project with Singapore. The start of construction is scheduled for next year. From 2027 the current should flow.
>> Read about this: Eon builds “hydrogen bridge” from Australia to Germany
The authorities in Australia are convinced that the plans – unlike Desertec – will actually be implemented. The Northern Territory government this week announced broad support for the project, including special legislation designed to increase project security and help Sun Cable “secure project funding.”
Prime Minister Michael Gunnar emphasized: “The legislation provides security for the project.” He described this as an important economic driver and as an opportunity for the region to make itself known as a renewable energy exporter.
If the project works, it would not only be a success for Australia and Singapore – but a real milestone in global energy supply. The project could prove that, thanks to the technological progress of the past decades, cross-continental green electricity projects are no longer a pipe dream, but a real alternative that Europe should also think about again. At the end of the day, it may turn out that the Desertec pioneer Gerhard Knies, who died at the end of 2017, was simply a little ahead of his time.
More: Asia wants to achieve the energy transition with floating solar parks.