Speaking at the Asia Clean Energy Summit in Singapore on Oct. 22, Singaporean Second Minister for Trade and Industry Tan See Leng (陳詩龍) spoke about the island state’s plans to import green energy through a 4,300km undersea transmission cable from a massive solar farm to be built in Darwin, Australia.
The project, which has been green-lit by Singapore and granted an environmental impact assessment permit by Australia in July this year, is to cost US$24 billion, with supply starting after 2035.
About US$170 million had already been invested in the project over the past three years and the contractor, Sun Cable, has completed a subsea survey for about 70 percent of the route.
Despite the hugely ambitious nature of the project, it appears to be going ahead. There is a need for it: Singapore produces more than 94 percent of its electricity from natural gas, but seeks to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and diversify its energy imports.
When Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) mentioned that he was considering setting up a green power plant on the Philippine island of Luzon, only 300km away compared with the 4,300km distance between Singapore and Darwin, he was roundly criticized.
It was right that Kuo received pushback for the plan, but not for the reasons given by his detractors.
The government does need to think creatively about how to address the nation’s energy mix demands, especially if it is to remove nuclear power, and how to replace carbon emissions with green energy sources to achieve its net zero carbon goal by 2050. Waiting until plans were more fully developed before openly mulling them would have been a preferable approach, but there are more important national security concerns, such as relying on vulnerable undersea cables as an energy source.
To be fair, Kuo did apologize to legislators when he was questioned about the proposal, saying that it was still in the discussion stage and that no concrete plans had been drawn up yet.
Sun Cable’s Australia-Asia Power Link project is indeed ambitious, and 300km sounds insignificant in comparison, but there are considerable challenges to overcome before such a project could be deemed viable.
Opposition legislators jumped on the opportunity to call the proposal an admission that the government’s assurances about sufficient energy supply were bogus, but they were intentionally missing the salient point to score political ones: It is not about insufficient power supply, it is about increasing the sustainable proportion of the energy mix in anticipation of 2050 and increased demand from artificial intelligence.
Even a lawmaker from the governing party, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lin Tai-hua (林岱樺), raised some concerns, saying that the Bashi Channel between Taiwan and the Philippines is up to 3,000m deep, with undersea canyons, so construction would be very difficult.
It would make more sense to establish a wind farm on Pingtan Island (平潭島), which is only 160km away and would only require cables to be laid under the Taiwan Strait, which is only 30m deep in some parts, Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元) wrote on Facebook.
Tsai was presumably being provocative with the suggestion, as Pingtan Island is in Chinese-controlled Fujian Province and there is no way a DPP government would consider such a proposition. Nevertheless, he did touch upon the most formidable challenge to Kuo’s undersea transmission cable plan: the national security angle.
Undersea cables are vulnerable to interference or destruction by hostile forces in the region, and the government should be very careful about implementing any plan that would leave Taiwan’s energy supply open to attack by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
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