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Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

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Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#191

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #167
defrost wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Indonesia is possibly the best place on the world for floating PV at sea (rather than inland lakes as it usually is).

Is anyone floating solar panels in the ocean? That sounds tough, but obviously worth exploring.

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#192

Post by monkeycantype »

Somewhere there is a doco about the guys who lay these cables, I’ve forgotten the name, does anyone know it? It has a focus on the guy who has his hand on the lever that controls the speed of the spool the cable is rolling off. This guy needs to have mastered the mysterious art of ‘slack control’, the intuitive understanding of exactly how much cable to drop down to the depths of the Atlantic. In my memory of the doco there are only a handful of people who do this professionally, and it’s not worth the hundreds of millions it would cost you to figure out what they know not to just hire them at eye watering rates to lift and lower the control lever guided by the secrets they know which you don’t

I feel like I saw it at imax, but it seems an odd topic for an imax movie?

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#193

Post by [deleted] »

vlasky wrote: post #139

I'm Aussie and I can't believe this Sun Cable project is being taken seriously by our government. The longest submarine power cable in the world - the Viking Link - is a mere 756 km long and cost US$2.2bn to build. Sun Cable calls for a 4,200km submarine cable to be built! I do not expect the construction cost to scale linearly and I shudder to imagine the maintenance difficulties and expenses. Back in December 2015,…

[deleted]

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#194

Post by londons_explore »

tim333 wrote: post #180
londons_explore wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apparently they use thyristors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thyristor#HVDC_electricity_tra... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_converter#Thyristor_valve...

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.

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#195

Post by aatharuv »

threeseed wrote: post #185
boringg wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a great sound byte for the politicains. Politicians aren't known for the economic and business acumen. Sound bytes and promise of jobs get them elected. Don't know the details of this project but if the cable is subsidized by the government it doesn't matter if it scales super or sublinearly, taxpayers are on the hook.

None of this really applies to Australia. a) Politicians are typically more educated than say in the US. b) They rely heavily on the public service who are experienced to do the heavy lifting. c) The jobs aren't in the areas that matter for Federal elections.

Your politicans, like Malcolm Turnbull in 2017, believe that the laws of Australia trump the laws of Mathematics, in the context of trying to weaken strong encryption. In at least some areas, they need a better education.

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#196

Post by [deleted] »

jfoster wrote: post #181
fidotron wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is nothing. Try Chile to China: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/11/15/chile-wants-to-export...

How could that even work? In some areas, surely the Pacific Ocean is deeper than any humans or deep ocean vehicles have ever been to? So would the cable be hanging across undersea chasms, or do they need to find a depth where it can be placed? Also, is it just so heavy that it doesn't need to be secured?

[deleted]

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#197

Post by roenxi »

ceejayoz wrote: post #182
eru wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one has to evacuate a city when someone breaks a solar panel, though. Deaths aren’t the only parameter here. Nuclear safety events are rare, rarely fatal, but can be very large in impacted area.

That isn't entirely fair.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#198

Post by Retric »

vlasky wrote: post #139

I'm Aussie and I can't believe this Sun Cable project is being taken seriously by our government. The longest submarine power cable in the world - the Viking Link - is a mere 756 km long and cost US$2.2bn to build. Sun Cable calls for a 4,200km submarine cable to be built! I do not expect the construction cost to scale linearly and I shudder to imagine the maintenance difficulties and expenses. Back in December 2015,…

You misunderstand the costs involved. The cable is cheap per km, the cost is largely HVDC equipment at either end.

This is why they aren’t breaking things up into several shorter hops to various islands on the way.

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#199

Post by bigiain »

nsonha wrote: post #115
bigiain wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

the country has a big housing affordability issue.

Heh. Australia is _huge_, and we still have that problem.

Re: Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

#200

Post by Gustomaximus »

aatharuv wrote: post #195
threeseed wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this really applies to Australia. a) Politicians are typically more educated than say in the US. b) They rely heavily on the public service who are experienced to do the heavy lifting. c) The jobs aren't in the areas that matter for Federal elections.

Your politicans, like Malcolm Turnbull in 2017, believe that the laws of Australia trump the laws of Mathematics, in the context of trying to weaken strong encryption. In at least some areas, they need a better education.

Not the best example for a tech savvy person. He had that image as he made a heap of $$ investing in some early internet company, but yeah he didn't seem to actually know what he was doing tech wise.

His real crime was playing a part in destroying the fibre to the premise internet rollout across Australia. He thought he could do it cheaper with mixed copper/coaxial technology.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/10/malcolm-turnbu...

I can't imagine how many billions this has cost the country and generally lowered our internet standards.

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