Page 4 - AsiaElec Week 43

AsiaElec COMMENTARY AsiaElec
Sunny news for Asia’s fossil fuel burners
Sun Cable has drummed up customer interest in its 3GW subsea cable from Australia to Singapore, as Australian green investors try to monetise the country’s solar potential, writes Richard Lockhart
SINGAPORE
WHAT:
Singapore has shown interest in Sun Cable’s 3GW subsea link from Australia
WHY:
Singaporean retailers are keen to diversify supply and hedge against oil and gas prices
WHAT NEXT:
The project will help decarbonise Singapore’s power sector, but the financing and engineering challenges are immense
AUSTRALIA’S ambitious plans to export up to 3,000 MW of electricity via an underwater power cable from the Northern Territory to Sin- gapore received a boost this week as Sun Cable chief executive David Griffin said Singaporean electricity retailers had shown “definite interest” in the project.
The A$20bn-plus ($14bn) Australia-Singa- pore Power Link (ASPL) project is supported by Australian tech billionaire Mike Can- non-Brookes, who launched the project in New York at September’s United Nations Climate Action Summit.
Cannon-Brookes’s Grok fund has yet to announce any investment figures, but Sun Cable has set a target date of 2023 for reaching financial closure for the venture.
Singapore support
One major Singapore retailer to speak out in favour of the project was iSwitch, which operates in the country’s liberalised retail market.
iSwitch chief commercial officer Andrew Koscharsky said joining the Sun Cable pro- ject “would be of great benefit for iSwitch and would also provide a limit to the amount of oil price exposure that we have to hedge via futures markets”.
“This is because of the strong and over-reli- ant oil price linkage that exists in the Singapore power market,” he said.
Up to 95% of Singapore’s electricity is gener- ated by imported LNG, which in Asia is indexed to benchmark oil prices.
Power demand stands at 6,500-7,000 MW, while the country has considerable over-capac- ity at 10,000 MW thanks to the construction of gas-fired thermal power plants (TPPs) in last 10 years.
iSwitch is a challenger operator, being Sin- gapore’s fastest-growing electricity retailer as it attempts to win market share from incumbent Singapore Power (SP).
Singapore has reformed its power market steadily since 2001, and in November 2018 implemented the Open Electricity Market (OME), which has allowed retail consumers to choose their supplier.
iSwitch markets itself as a “green” retailer and is looking for ways to source more green elec- tricity and to hedge the risks associated with the country’s gas-dominated power market.
“Our business is highly scalable and, as a foundation customer, we would be confident of satisfying a good portion of the off-take, with additional flexibility,” Koscharsky said.
Sun Cable details
Singapore-registered Sun Cable’s Austral- ia-Singapore Power Link (ASPL) aims to build a 15,000-hectare, 10-GW solar PV project at Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, 20-30
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 43 29•October•2019