The world is on the cusp of an energy transformation that could make the Industrial Revolution look minor. Mike Cannon-Brookes is banking on the Land Down Under to be a major driver of that change.
The billionaire co-founder of software giant Atlassian plans for Australia, where he grew up, to become the hub for the two biggest renewable-energy projects ever. According to Bloomberg, the SunCable project will build a 20-gigawatt solar farm and a 4,300-kilometer undersea transmission cable, called the Australia-Asia PowerLink.
But even he acknowledges this $21 billion undertaking by SunCable is a “completely bats*** insane project.” Still, it’s the first step in a 10-step outline to move clean energy to Asia from one of the sunniest places on Earth. This cable would run along the bed of the Indian Ocean and feed Singapore’s great demand for electricity.
Australia could produce 10,000 times more solar power than it consumes, as reported by Bloomberg, though it is a coal behemoth and exports more than any country besides Indonesia.
It will take governments, companies, the wealthy and powerful, and individuals to fully divest from such dirty energy sources, which are rapidly heating the planet and leading to more severe and frequent storms, wildfires, and other weather events.
Cannon-Brookes compared the energy transition to technology disruption, saying: “Everyone changed to a smartphone over a five-year period.”
“Averting catastrophic climate change will require a similar rapid societal shift, including changing how energy is generated and delivered,” Brian Kahn wrote. “In BloombergNEF’s net-zero scenario, solar will be the world’s largest source of clean energy by 2030. To get there will require building the equivalent of the world’s largest solar farm every few days by the end of the decade.”
No. I don’t want one giant Billionaire-backed project. I want a million small scale projects backed by local communities.
I agree, but this billionaire can do what few communities can: invest in scale.
Overall I still think this is good news.
I’d describe my feelings around the current solar boom as cautiously positive with a good sprinkle of skepticism.
I’d like to see billionaires investing in education towards self-regulating communities. I’d like to see them heavily investing in funding coops, not buying up startups. Billionaires investing in renewables means more money in billionaire’s pockets, because they will just sell the clean energy back to you for a profit while remaining the owners of everything and then some.
I’d carefully agree that more solar panels are good, but I’ve now lived through enough eco hypes to not have at least a few concerns. In the worst case we will now quickly and thoughtlessly plaster solar panels over hectares and hectares of useful farmland, important ecological reserves, and poor people’s homes, just because line go up. And probably trash them all in ten years when maintaining them proves too costly, or the next hype comes along. In the best case we actually start polluting less and use the time we buy to seek for more energy-saving ways of living in general.
I wonder to what extent they can take advantage of the ocean liquid cooling the cables to increase transmission capabilities.
Edit: On further thought, I guess they don’t want excess heat as that would increase losses, so while the cooling could be beneficial, preventing the heat in the first place would be better.
This seems pretty cool. It’s no crazier than putting a communication cable across the oceans and we already have the support for that. Is there something I’m missing?
Transmission over long distances is much harder with power since you have to send it through cables that have some resistance; fiber optic cables are reflecting light that doesn’t degrade as quick.
I think this is doable, the only question is, at what cost? Losing a lot of energy is inefficient, but that’s only if you care about the efficiency more than the result (getting cleaner energy to a place that wouldn’t have it otherwise). There may be better solutions, but I appreciate the desire to get this going here.
I wonder what happens if the cable that carries this much power breaks under water. And even if it doesn’t break the elecro-magnetic field around it is gonna be massive.
But anyway, other similar projects have either failed (plans to build such a giant solar-farm in Morocco) or have pivoted to “green” hydrogen as the energy transport medium.
I agree. They’ve also come a long way since the original cable were put in for communication in 1858. Granted, it took almost a 100 years for tech to catch up. We’re pretty innovative now though.
It’s starting to become increasingly common - there’s a project in the offing to run a cable from Morocco to the UK to take advantage of all that Saharan sunshine. There’s long been talk of stringing a few across the Med and building large numbers of solar farms across North Africa to speed up the green transition in Europe (at one point there was talk of worried insurance companies bankrolling such projects as climate change could bankrupt them). Eventually there will be a web of such cables into and across Europe shuttling energy around - excess British being stored in Norwegian HEP facilities, etc.
Oh my fuck, finally a rich person did something actually. I never thought I’d see the day.
A billionaire tries to extract more money from the average citizen by supplying a basic human need and you love it 😂
Idiot troll. This platform is rife with y’all. It’s become an issue, frankly. Honestly worse about it than Reddit, which is super unexpected. Fact is that solar is one of the best green energy industries that exist. A person using their big money to help it, especially in an INTERNATIONAL manner like this, isn’t a negative. We don’t have a method of free perpetual energy if you didn’t notice, because somebody fucking murdered Nikola Tesla and destroyed his research to this effect. Probably there’s even further people that have tried and been murdered and erased. You can thank capitalism for that, which if you ever bothered to read, you would know I am fully opposed to.
Strange take. I’m not trolling
If a sociopath who has already extracted enough money for his own greed from society to have a catastrophic effect on the lives of ordinary people decides to invest in solar power, I’m going to be sceptical
As the yanks say, you do you
