Flogging Unreliable Energy By Extension Cord To Singapore Looks Like An Outrageous Fraud
Guest Blogger / 2 hours ago August 2, 2020 INTERNATIONAL SCAM OF THE YEAR?
Guest Post by Michael Darby Sunday 2 August 2020 Australia has granted major project status to AU$22bn solar, storage and transmission project which intends to sell unreliable energy to Singapore by undersea cable from Darwin. Here is the LINK to that story.
Ways to profit from a gigantic scam include milking subsidies & tax benefits and ramping shares. No government should bestow Major Project Status on a doomed “project” where no profit will ever be made from selling a product to a willing buyer. Australians call on the Prime Minister to guarantee that not one cent of public money will be committed to any fraudulent plan aimed at subsidies and lurks.
Any government which endorses a scam deserves to be brought down. Who will receive the greatest reward from the CCP for billions of dollars worth of materials and/or components for useless solar panels? Any fund manager who goes anywhere near a scam will be exposed. Any individual who encourages any private investor to contribute to a scam will be committing an unconscionable crime.
Every rational commercial project begins with a perceived demand. Spruikers for the Australian ASEAN Power Link (AAPL)[1], which is better described as the extension cord project have provided no indication of demand or need in mostly gas-fuelled Singapore for any quantity of electrical energy emanating from Australia. Nor is there any evidence of research into the Singapore electricity price structure.
Singapore’s industries[2] include 20% of the world’s ship repair, petroleum refining, major biotechnology research operations, heavily commercialised medical tourism, and frontline entities in information and communications technology. All of these entities, plus every arm of the Singapore Government, will demand unequivocal guarantees that all imported energy be wholly uninterrupted and continuous.
Do not imagine that the putative purveyors of pusillanimous power can fall back on asking Singaporeans to invest in more back-up gas turbines or any other artifice. From the beginning, supply must be totally secure and dependable, 24 hours a day.
The Basslink[3] HVDC interconnector between Victoria and Tasmania has the capacity to carry 500KW, one twentieth of the intended capacity of the extension cord. Basslink is 370km long, and cost A$800 million (in 2005 dollars) to build. We can predict that building and installing a 500KW undersea cable for 3,350 km (the theoretical minimum distance) will cost A$7.24bn in 2005 dollars. I invite any electrical engineer to confirm or correct my expectation that the cost of the cable will increase in proportion to the square root of the increase in carrying capacity. The square root of 20 is 4.472 so we calculate a cost for the undersea cable at $32bn (2005 dollars). According to the Bureau of Census and Statistics[4], $32bn in 2005 equates to $44bn in 2020, twice the $22bn falsely promoted as the total capital investment.
AAPL’s website asserts[5] that a storage facility with the capacity of 30GWh will “enable 24/7 dispatch of power”. The Highview liquid air battery[6] with a capacity of 250MWh (compared with the 150MWh capacity of the Tesla battery in South Australia) is being built near Manchester UK at a cost of A$148.25m, or A$0.593m per MWh. At the same cost per MWh, a 30GWh storage device will cost A$17.789bn.
A$17.789bn – for the claimed storage requirement alone – is more than 80% of the A$22bn figure touted as the total capital cost of the project.
The Electrical Engineering Portal[7] suggests that the capital cost of 750km of 2GW HVDC is around US$450m or A$626.4m. To adjust the cost from 2GW HVDC to 10GW HDVC we multiply by the square root of 5 which is 2.236, giving an estimate of $1.4bn. The total cost of storage and power transmission onshore and undersea is now $63.5bn, nearly three times the falsely claimed total budget.
The per MW capital cost of a solar farm in 2020 is estimated by Solar Mango[8] at £720,000 or A$1.3m. That equates to $1.304bn per GW or $13bn capital expenditure for nameplate 10GW of solar-generated electricity.
Here is how the CAPEX looks so far:
Solar Farm 10GW nameplate capacity $13.0 bn
Storage 30 GWh as proposed $17.8 bn
Transmission 750km to Darwin $1.4 bn
Undersea Cable $44.3 bn Total $76.5 bn
The revelation that a conservative estimate of the cost is nearly three and half times the whole advertised budget should be enough to condemn this scam immediately. But it gets worse, much, much worse.
30GWH provides three hours of backup for 10GW of generation capacity. Others may make a better-informed assessment, but I estimate that guaranteeing genuine round-the-clock 10GW power will require sixty hours of backup, that is 600GWh. The cost of 600GWh of backup is $355.8bn. Even sixty hours may not be enough. Northern Territory residents report that the wet season commonly brings six or seven consecutive days when rain and cloud allow maximum ten percent functionality for solar panels.
We have not yet costed the process of obtaining permissions; from the Federal Government, from the Northern Territory Government and from all affected Aboriginal Communities. We have not costed bonds for decommissioning. We have not costed the insurance premiums required to protect the project from claims from customers when the extension cord is severed by an undersea volcano. We have not costed the PR campaign to persuade the Singaporeans that they need to import electricity and to convince them that electricity generated from intermittent sunlight can be reliably delivered. We have not yet costed the risk to worldwide economies from the possible plague of hysterical laughter when the world reads this in WUWT.
At the very best, 10GW of nameplate solar power will provide 10GW for only 40% of the time. Let’s accept that we are dealing with 100 units of time, and for 60 units of that time we need stored power. But because stored power is subject to losses, we need to generate enough stored power to cater for 75 units of time, knowing that 20% will be lost. So 10GW nameplate solar power, supported by whatever (hang the expense) backup is required, can be expected to provide (40 divided by 115 multiplied by ten) 3.478GW of continuous power. 10GW divided by 3.478GW is 2.875.
If you want to produce 10GW of reliable power, you need nameplate capacity 2.875 times 10GW, which is 28.75GW.
Readers might imagine that the total destruction of this appalling scam is complete. No, there is more to come. HVDC losses reportedly[9] approach 3% per 1,000km. 4,100 km total transmission distance means budgeting for 12% in losses off the top of potential revenue. Each GW delivered requires generation of 1.136667GW. So the nameplate capacity requirement is increased from 28.75GW to 32.679GW. Reliable continuous delivery of 10GW of solar-generated electricity to Singapore will require a capital investment of $42.62 billion in a solar farm with nameplate capacity of 32.679GW.
The capital investment required for 60 hours backup for 11.3667GW reliable output is the frightening sum of A$1,163bn, one and one-sixth trillion dollars.
The Pavakarda Solar Park[10] in the South West-Indian State Karnataka (formerly Mysore) uses 53 square kilometres for a nameplate capacity of 2.05GW. So for 10GW of nameplate capacity expect to use 259 square kilometres. If the aim is 10GW of reliably delivered power, then we multiply 259 sq km by 3.2679 to require 845 square kilometres containing $44.37bn worth of solar panels, with components built in China at a shocking environmental cost[11]. Component construction may involve slave labour[12] using materials mined in Africa very likely with slave labour.
What is a rational capital cost for supplying 3.5GW of reliable energy, which exceeds the average energy expectation of 3.478GW available from 10GW of solar panels? As reported on 5 April 2020, Poland is planning[13] to invest in nuclear reactors at US$4,500 per Kw or at today’s rate A$6,264 per Kw. That puts the capital cost of nuclear electricity generation at A$6.264m per MW or A$6.264bn per GW. For 3.5GW of safe reliable continuous nuclear energy, the capital cost is A$21.924bn, coincidentally slightly less than the A$22bn falsely claimed as capital cost by the backers of the extension cord project.
