Nobody has poured a footing at Powell Creek yet. That’s the fact worth sitting with before anything else: three years after the first big splash about a solar farm the size of a small city out past Elliott in the Northern Territory, and eighteen months on from a takeover that changed who’s actually paying for it, the Australia-Asia PowerLink is still a project on paper, permits and pitch decks. That’s not necessarily damning for a scheme of this size. But it’s worth being plain about where things actually sit, because the marketing has always run well ahead of the shovels.
What’s on the ground right now #
SunCable’s plan, in its original form, was audacious even by the standards of a country that likes to think big about renewables: a solar and battery precinct on pastoral land in the Barkly region, feeding a transmission line north to Darwin, and then a subsea high-voltage direct current cable running roughly 4,300 kilometres through Indonesian waters to Singapore. The company has spent the past few years doing what these projects do before construction: land access agreements with pastoral leaseholders, environmental baseline studies, route surveys for the cable corridor, and the long slog through Commonwealth environmental approval under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. None of that shows up as steel in the ground. It’s the unglamorous, expensive groundwork that either gets a project to a final investment decision or quietly kills it. SunCable hasn’t reached FID on either the Australian or Singapore leg. That’s the single fact that matters most right now, more than any of the artist’s renderings.
The fight that nearly ended it #
Readers with a decent memory will recall January 2023, when SunCable went into voluntary administration. The proximate cause was a disagreement between its two biggest backers, Mike Cannon-Brookes’s Grok Ventures and Andrew Forrest’s Squadron Energy, over how much capital the company needed to raise and on what terms. It wasn’t a case of the project being unfinanceable so much as two very wealthy, very different investors wanting to run it differently. Squadron exited. Grok Ventures led a consortium that bought the company out of administration a few months later, bringing in new backers including Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners, a specialist energy transition investor with form on large-scale Australian renewables and storage. That’s who owns and directs the project now.
I don’t think that dispute should be read as evidence the project is fundamentally broken – big infrastructure ventures fall out over funding structure all the time, and this one is genuinely huge by any measure. But it did burn a year, and it forced a rethink of scope that’s still working its way through the project today.
Darwin first, Singapore second #
The most consequential thing to come out of the restructure is the staging. Under Grok and Quinbrook, SunCable has leaned into a domestic-first sequencing: build the solar and storage precinct and the transmission spine into Darwin, supply Territory industry and any new green manufacturing load there, and treat the Singapore export cable as a genuinely separate, later phase rather than something that has to be financed and built in lockstep with the rest of the project. That’s a sensible de-risking move and, on the numbers, probably the only realistic way to get the Australian half moving without waiting on a single very long undersea cable clearing every hurdle first.
It’s also, frankly, the right call and I’ll say so plainly: betting the entire commercial case on one 4,300-kilometre subsea link to a single foreign buyer, before a watt of Territory power has even been sold domestically, always struck me as an oddly concentrated risk for a project this size. Splitting it lets the Darwin end earn revenue and prove the generation and storage technology while the export cable, genuinely the hardest and most novel part, works through its own approvals and financing on a separate track. It also plugs into work already under way in the Territory’s Renewable Energy Zones planning, the same kind of transmission thinking covered in our piece on renewable energy zones and the pushback they’ve drawn elsewhere.
The cable itself, and why it’s the hard part #
Think about what happens on a much smaller scale on a suburban roof. Run a DC string too far from panel to inverter and you start losing real energy to resistance in the copper, which is why any installer worth their licence sizes the cable gauge up, or splits the array into shorter strings, once the run gets long. Now multiply that problem by roughly four million, add several hundred metres of ocean depth in parts of the Indonesian archipelago, and you’re closer to what SunCable’s export cable is actually fighting. HVDC subsea links lose far less over distance than AC would, which is the whole reason the technology gets specified for a run this long, but you still need enormous converter stations at each end – essentially oversized, very expensive versions of the transformer on your street, flipping AC to DC on the way out and back to AC on the way in. Cable of this length, laid at this depth, at this capacity, hasn’t been done anywhere in the world at the scale SunCable originally proposed. That’s not a reason to write it off. It is a reason to treat every stated timeline with a healthy pinch of salt.
On the Singapore side, the country’s Energy Market Authority has run a conditional approval process for several proposed electricity import projects, including SunCable’s, as part of Singapore’s push to bring low-carbon power in from the region by the early 2030s. Conditional approval is not a signed contract, and it’s not a guarantee the volumes or timing SunCable has talked about publicly will hold. It’s a green light to keep developing, nothing more.
What it would actually cost, and who’s carrying that #
SunCable has never nailed down a single hard capital figure for the full scheme, and any number floating around should be read as an early-stage estimate rather than a locked budget. These projects routinely move by billions between concept and FID, and this one spans two countries and a piece of undersea engineering without a close precedent. What’s clearer is the funding architecture: Grok Ventures and Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners as the controlling equity, with the expectation that debt and further equity partners come in closer to FID on each stage, Darwin first. That’s a conventional structure for greenfield transmission-scale infrastructure. It also means the project remains, in practical terms, privately backed rather than underwritten by Commonwealth or NT government money in the way some transmission and firming projects are supported through mechanisms like the Capacity Investment Scheme. The Northern Territory government has granted the project Major Project Status, which speeds up planning coordination, but that’s process support, not cash.
Why the grid should care even before it’s built #
It’s tempting to file the PowerLink under exotic mega-projects that don’t touch the day-to-day grid most Australians deal with. That’s not quite right. If the Darwin-first stage lands as planned, it changes the calculus for the isolated Darwin-Katherine grid and for Territory industry looking for firmed renewable supply rather than diesel or gas. It’s a live case study in the same firming question that dogs every big renewables build on the mainland NEM – solar and batteries are cheap to build and useless at 7pm without storage or transmission to move the power somewhere it’s still needed, a point we’ve gone through in detail comparing pumped hydro and batteries as firming technologies. It also sits in the same conversation as the grid-stability questions raised by grid-forming inverters, since an isolated system taking on that much new solar and battery capacity needs exactly that kind of technology to stay stable without a large synchronous coal or gas fleet sitting underneath it.
And if the export leg to Singapore ever does get built, it would be the first time an Australian generator sold electricity directly into another country’s grid at scale: a genuinely new category of infrastructure for this continent, sitting outside the NEM entirely and answerable to a different regulator on the other end of the cable.
The honest state of play #
I keep a mental list of Australian energy projects that get announced with a flourish and then spend years quietly working through approvals while the headlines move on to something shinier. SunCable’s PowerLink is squarely on that list right now, and there’s no shame in that. It’s what a project this size is supposed to look like at this stage, however unglamorous. Our earlier look at where the PowerLink stood earlier this year flagged the same pattern: real progress on approvals and route work, no FID, no construction. That hasn’t changed as fast as SunCable’s own updates would have you believe.
Somewhat unrelated, but it’s the season for it: I managed to kill another succulent on my balcony over winter purely by ignoring it, which gives me a small, stubborn sympathy for anything that has to survive out past Elliott through a Territory dry season and still be expected to perform on schedule. Big infrastructure and pot plants have that in common – neglect it and pretend the timeline hasn’t slipped, and eventually the thing in front of you tells the truth anyway. Whether Darwin sees power out of Powell Creek before the end of the decade is the number worth watching, not the render of the cable landing in Singapore.
– Priya Nair, Solar & Distributed Energy Correspondent