Singapore grants conditional approval for solar power import from Australia

Singapore has granted conditional approval to Sun Cable (Singapore) Assets to import low-carbon electricity from Australia.

Australian solar project developer Sun Cable will build a massive solar farm in the southern region of Darwin, the state capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory, at the total cost of $24 billion.

Some 1.75 GW of the generated electricity will be transported to Singapore via 4,300 kilometres of subsea cables.

The supply could start some time after 2035, Sun Cable said.

Speaking at the recent Asia Clean Energy Summit on the second day of the Singapore International Energy Week, Singapore's Second Minister for Trade and Industry Tan See Leng said that the project is an ambitious one, considering the scale and distance between Australia and Singapore.

He added that the Singaporean Government will continue to allow credible clean electricity import projects, even if they take longer to materialize and extend beyond 2035.

The Sun Cable project was initiated in 2019, with a view to beginning construction as early as mid-2023. Operations were projected to start in early 2026 and be completed by late 2027.

However, in January 2023, the project collapsed when Sun Cable entered voluntary administration due to a funding dispute between Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest and tech firm Atlassian’s co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes.

By May that year, a consortium led by Cannon-Brookes’ Grok Ventures had acquired the company, finalizing the takeover in September 2023. The Australian government gave the project the go-ahead in August 2024, allowing the electricity to be exported to Singapore.

This development comes after Singapore raised its clean electricity import target to 6 GW in September, which will account for around 30% of electricity demand by 2035. Aside from the Sun Cable project, 5.6 GW of import deals have been signed with Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam thus far.