Mike Cannon-Brookes, the do-gooder billionaire, who would send Aussie sunshine to Singapore, is becoming a laughing stock.
You can’t fault the scale of Cannon-Brookes’s ambitions. SunCable could generate about four times more electricity than the Northern Territory currently consumes. Excess power would flow 4,300 kilometers (2,700 miles) through the world’s longest and deepest undersea power cable, to provide about 15% of Singapore’s electricity.
Still, there are better ways to tackle the problems of Asia’s fossil-fuel dependency — and $700 million spent in the right place could achieve far more. Here’s how.
As we’ve written, the engineering challenges involved in laying SunCable’s undersea cable will likely mean it never gets built. What’s more, in the time it has been in development, Singapore has switched from being a laggard on renewables to a serious mover, with ambitions to import its own 4.2GW from Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam, significantly more than the 1.75GW SunCable is offering.
Bugger that. Send the power south into the NEM. Australia has has bigger carbon problem than Japan. We’ve only cut emissions thanks to population growth:
I’m all for capturing the sunshine.
If Mr Cannon-Brookes does it for Australia, it will have a much larger impact worldwide as the fossil fuel king goes clean.
