by Ganesh Sahathevan
Singapore’s Energy Market Authority (EMA) has granted conditional approval to Sun Cable to import 1.75 gigawatts (GW) of low-carbon electricity from Australia’s Northern Territory to Singapore, says Minister for Manpower and Second Minister for Trade and Industry Tan See Leng.
Sun Cable’s US$24 billion ($31.6 billion) Australia-Asia Power Link (AAPowerLink) project involves laying a 4,300km subsea power cable connecting a solar farm in Australia’s Northern Territory to Singapore via Indonesian waters.
Considering the scale and distance of the project, Tan expects the Sun Cable project to only come online after 2035. “When completed, the project will be a meaningful complement to the Asean Power Grid and it will serve as an additional source of low-carbon electricity for Singapore.”
Minister Tan's ambition for Sun Cable to be a "a meaningful complement to the Asean Power Grid" is admirable and it is in keeping with his Prime Minister Lawrence Wong's ambition for Singapore to be a renewable energy hub.
However the ASEAN Power Grid agreement does not provide Australia to be part of the Grid. Typical of ASEAN it has taken 15 years between the signing of the ASEAN Power Grid agreement in 2009 and the ASEAN Power Grid Advancement Programme (APG-AP), which is likely to be a series of further talks which will see little if anything being actually done. In any case, none of this involves Australia.
Singapore's declaration that Sun Cable will be "a meaningful complement to the Asean Power Grid" is in fact meaningless, and it is hard to see why Minister Tan See Leng has chosen to make his unillateral declaration including Australia in the ASEAN Power Grid.
END
No comments:
Post a Comment