Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

Eh, Factually correct (the best kind) but to be a little more specific:

> "... Renewable energy developer Sun Cable has secured approval from the Australian government for the Australian element of its Australia-Asia Power Link (AAPowerLink) interconnector. ..."

So they have licence to make the PV farm, and to cable it to a head-end, and to run HVDC to the edge of Australian Exclusive Maritime Zone.

What happens after that is still subject to other people.

There's hope of a domestic customer as well. That's important because the location is pretty unpopulated and otherwise under-developed. Prospects for onshore HVDC to customers are low right now: the closest thing is a service called "Copperstring" targetting the mining/metals industry being done in Qld but its about 1000km away and there are few customers except at the end of a long line

That aside, Darwin and Port infra will be there but on the normalised "3 million homes" model of scaling Darwin is 60,000 homes or less.

Can someone explain how this makes sense economically, isn't it really expensive and lossy to transport electricity such a long distance?

That depends. It could be that they use aluminum instead. Apparently that's quite common in HVDC cables and interesting for cost reasons.

Aluminium is almost as good by cross section, much cheaper, and the global (mainly Chinese) production is sufficient for a global (40 megameter) multi-terrawatt power grid every 18 months or so.

And yes, I did do the maths; and also yes it's really just China at the "global terrawatt" scale (they've become a dominant aluminium supplier), but a much smaller distance and power rating is probably fine even if China doesn't sell you the metal.

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.