North Australia’s electrifying future: powering Asia with renewables

Northern futures, northern voices: It seems everyone has ideas about how Australia’s north could be better, but most of those ideas come from the south. In this six-part weekly series, developed by the Northern Research Futures Collaborative Research Network and The Conversation, northern researchers lay out their own plans for a feasible, sustainable future.

By Andrew Campbell, Andrew Blakers and Stuart Blanch

It may just be election season, but big dreams for the development of northern Australia are back in fashion. So here’s our piece of “next-frontier”, big-picture 21st-century thinking. It may even have room for a dam or two.

A Snowy scheme for the 21st century

Imagine a project that could help Indonesia achieve energy security, dramatically cut energy poverty for hundreds of millions, catalyse renewable energy production in Assocation of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, cut regional carbon pollution, and transition Australia’s energy exports from risky fuels to renewable energy.

Sounds far-fetched? In fact, such a proposal has already been published in the international peer-reviewed literature. It takes several existing technologies already in widespread deployment, and joins them together in a new configuration on an unprecedented scale, in a region with enormous natural competitive advantage — north-western Australia.

Here’s the plan.

Take part (say 2,500 km2) of an existing cattle station somewhere near Lake Argyle and cover one third of it with solar panels on tracking arrays. Build a large reservoir upslope at least 300 metres above Lake Argyle, holding at least 1,000 gigalitres of water.

Build a 100 gigawatt power station that uses solar energy to pump water from the lake up to the upper reservoir. The water flows back down the hill through turbines at night, generating power to the grid 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Schematic of the spine of a hypothetical HVDC grid linking north Australia and SE Asia Andrew Blakers

 

Hundreds of “pumped hydro” schemes of this nature are already working well around the world, albeit not on this scale.

The “grid” in this case, would be an integrated south-east Asian supergrid, the spine of which would be a High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) cable running from northern Australia along the Indonesian archipelago and up into the Philippines, Malaysia and Indochina, and then eventually into China.

The capital cost of building such a power station, storage and HVDC link and extending it as far as Jakarta is estimated at around US$500 billion. This compares with Indonesia’s current projections that it needs to invest US$1,000 billion in conventional (coal and nuclear) power stations to meet its energy needs over the next 40 years.

The electricity price in Jakarta from this scheme would be around 8 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with the current 6 cents price (externalities excluded) from coal-fired power in Indonesia.

Much cleaner energy, forever, at a comparable price. What’s not to like?

If this sounds unlikely, or too grand by half, let’s back up and look at the individual elements in turn.

Looking back, and looking forward

The year 2022 will mark 150 years since the first telegraph submarine cable was laid between Darwin and Java, subverting the tyranny of distance by connecting Australia to the rest of the world. It instantly changed our sense of identity, making inter-continental communication possible in hours instead of weeks and months.

For northern Australia, the telegraph line accelerated settlement and growth of the pastoral and mining industries.

Today, northern Australia remains a contested landscape, with some seeing a next frontier for development, and others sounding caution.

Northern Australia should have a much bigger role to play in the rapid growth of its northern neighbours than as a mendicant northern outpost of a big empty continent. The Asian Century White Paper counsels that our future success will be determined by the choices we make today, not on chance.

Almost 150 years after Australia and Asia connected via the telegraph link, it’s time to lay more cables.

The basic idea is to meet the projected almost doubling of energy demand in South East Asia by 2030, by exporting renewable energy from north-western Australia.

For the moment we are focusing on solar energy, because some of the world’s highest solar insolation (the amount of solar energy falling in an area) levels (5-7 kWh/m2/day) are in the region south of Darwin, between Katherine and the Tanami Desert, and the technology is proven and readily available.

We could meet all of Australia’s energy needs from a solar farm the size of one cattle station.Andrew Blakers

In the longer term, geothermal and tidal renewable energy could also feed into this grid.

Several scoping projects have looked at the idea in detail. We recently brought a bunch of energy transmission engineers, consultants, academics and NGOs from Indonesia and Australia to Darwin to map out opportunities and challenges.

The consensus was that this idea is ambitious, but technically feasible and doable. Our Indonesian colleagues had already mapped such a possibility.

There are more than 20 HVDC sub-sea electricity cables around the world today, with many more planned. Renewable energy is exported very profitably and reliably undersea 580km from Norway to The Netherlands and 280km from Tasmania to Victoria.

Iceland plans to wire geothermal power to Scotland, and the Desertec project aims to send solar power 3,000km from Algeria to industrial Germany. Transmission losses in HVDC cables are now down to a few percent per 1000km, more than offset by the 50-100% “solar insolation advantage” of northern Australia over Java, together with the ready availability of land.

The economic equation is moving in the right direction as the price of renewables drops sharply, and as the world starts to put a price on the negative externalities of fossil fuels, including carbon emissions.

Yes it is technically formidable, and assembling the necessary geopolitical and financial architecture to make it happen won’t be trivial.

But the drivers are compelling.

This project would secure sustainable energy and low carbon futures for the fastest growing region on Earth, reducing energy conflicts and energy poverty, tackling climate change and saving rainforests, and exploiting the region’s natural advantage in renewable resources.

This project would catapult us to the forefront of the technology savvy and rapidly growing green energy sector, generating many thousands of high-tech jobs in Australia and beyond.

Such a project would integrate northern Australia into south-east Asia as never before. Indeed it would be transformative for this region, giving real ambition to the idea of “the next frontier”.

Andrew Campbell is dDirector, Research Institute for Environment and Livelihoods at Charles Darwin University. Andrew Blakers is directors of the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems (CSES) at ANU. Stuart Blanch is adjunct research fellow at Charles Darwin University.  

This article was co-authored by Rob Law, Policy Officer at Environment Centre NT.

Comments

8 responses to “North Australia’s electrifying future: powering Asia with renewables”

  1. Truthful Jones Avatar
    Truthful Jones

    Tremendous idea! .. all we need now is some moderately far-sighted people to stand up and agree to make it happen. That means it should not depend on any politician for its achievement, but count on them to be there to take credit when it succeeds.

  2. No More Nuclear Waste Avatar
    No More Nuclear Waste

    This is the sort of thing that needs to be put on the national agenda. Solar insolation is a natural resource that we have an advantage in and that we dont have to spend billions on exploring for before we even start thinking about heading to the starting line. Come on Australia!

  3. Diego Matter Avatar
    Diego Matter

    The government has only to pay for the planning phase costs.

    The financing can then be opened up to every terrestrial (A$550 billion is only A$25,000 per Australian) and other entities. They would all get a return on their investment.

    Crowd funding is the vehicle to make it happen.

    Our family would absolutely invest in it!

  4. Ronald Brakels Avatar
    Ronald Brakels

    The plan’s a bit cheeky. I’m pretty sure Indonesia has better locations for pumped storage, having both high elevations and water. It’s also cheeky because Australia is the world leader in whacking solar on the roof instead of on the ground in big solar farms. With Indonesia looking to reduce subsidies for electricity it seems likely they will take a page out of Australia’s book and stick solar on their roofs. Sure they don’t have as much roofspace per person, but they also have a lot of untapped geothermal potential to make up the diff and they can always use Indonesian pumped storage to help meet peak demand.

    1. dwj Avatar
      dwj

      I would have to agree with you Ronald. Indonesia has huge, untapped hydro resources in West Papua which would be much cheaper for them to develop. Also, this plan is a bit like the large scale King Island wind scheme in that the cost of transmission is comparable with the cost of generation; so why not just place the generation near the demand. Java has much better solar resources than Germany.

    2. Chris Fraser Avatar
      Chris Fraser

      All considerations (especially environmental ones) would have to be included to see if it has legs. The vastness of Northwest Australia for pondage as opposed to building dams in densely populated areas of Indonesia, and the impact on their forested areas and species diversity.
      I’m not a big fan of dams. Energy losses from pumping hydro is similar to batteries, and yet batteries are improving. The construction time and budget for batteries would be less although the asset life of the dam would be longer. The environmental impact of battery building is much less than a dam of similar capacity. Some of the dam proposal is struggling to add up, but the solar proposal is very much ahead.

  5. Leigh Ewbank Avatar
    Leigh Ewbank

    Nice work Andrew and coauthors. It’s good to see some big picture thinking for a change.

  6. Mic Galvin Avatar
    Mic Galvin

    Low impact community owned localised power is sensible. High transmissions and losses is not. Hardly worth it actually in terms of efficiency. Large scale Solar Farms fry birds. More birds than what you think. Wind farms now claiming well over 20x more birds than we think. Have to be transmitted back to power stations who fire up gas turbines due to a duty of care to customers, wind is wasted. Maintenance? Vertical wind actually has less creep stresses and vortices scouring out blades and causing creeks. Vertical helical and spiral aerofoil is silent, bird friendly, receives lower speed wind and higher speed cut out wind, receives more turbulent wind from every direction. Wind is important however for many reasons. Denmark had the highest cost energy in the world, gets brown outs, and has to buy it back off German power stations. Birds and bees do not like transmission. Fish do not like Cloud seeding and dams. Huge biodiversity loss around the world from dams now as the West disaster capitalising from global warming and terror. A fascist, Neoliberal New Green Deal, totalitarian nihilistic ideological extremism that is fraudulent.

Get up to 3 quotes from pre-vetted solar (and battery) installers.