Roughly 4,200 kilometres of high-voltage direct-current subsea cable. A solar farm in the Northern Territory that would cover more ground than some Australian suburbs put together. And a collapse, in January 2023, that stopped one of the most ambitious energy export proposals ever put to paper. Three and a half years on from that administration filing, the Australia-Asia PowerLink is still alive — technically — but the version being advanced today looks quite different from the one Mike Cannon-Brookes and Andrew Forrest were publicly fighting over.
I’ve been watching this project on and off since the original feasibility announcements, and I’ll be honest: I was not expecting it to survive the administrator in any meaningful form. It has, though just barely.
What the Australia-Asia PowerLink actually is #
The concept is straightforward enough. Build a very large solar farm — originally scoped at up to 20 gigawatts of generation capacity — near Darwin in the Northern Territory, pair it with a battery storage system big enough to firm overnight supply, and run a subsea HVDC cable to Singapore. Sell the electrons. Singapore, with virtually no domestic renewable resource, has been openly shopping for clean electricity imports under its Energy Market Authority’s regional power trade frameworks.
Think of it like a very long extension cord between a sun-drenched paddock and a city-state that can’t build its own solar. The physics work. A high-voltage direct-current line loses far less energy over long distances than alternating current does — roughly 3 to 4 percent per 1,000 kilometres on a well-engineered HVDC link, versus the losses you’d accumulate on AC infrastructure of comparable length. That’s the engineering case. The financial case has always been harder.
The original Sun Cable Pty Ltd estimated the project at something north of $30 billion Australian. That figure was always a placeholder more than a fixed cost — pre-FEED, pre-detailed routing, years from any financial close.
The 2023 collapse and what caused it #
Sun Cable entered voluntary administration in January 2023 after its two biggest backers — Cannon-Brookes’s Grok Ventures and Forrest’s Squadron Energy vehicle — could not agree on a restructure path. The public disagreement centred on the project’s direction and valuation, though neither party has detailed the precise breakdown in any filing I’ve been able to locate. Administrators from FTI Consulting took control.
Cannon-Brookes’s Grok Ventures ultimately acquired the project out of administration in mid-2023, partnering with infrastructure investor Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners. Quinbrook is not a household name in Australian residential solar, but the firm has a track record of backing large-scale clean energy infrastructure across Australia and the United States. The Grok-Quinbrook consortium paid a figure that was not publicly disclosed — standard practice for an administration sale — and set about rebuilding the project’s commercial and technical case.
Andrew Forrest’s Squadron Energy, for its part, has continued building its own renewables portfolio in Australia, which I’ve covered separately in this assessment of Squadron’s broader strategy.
What Grok and Quinbrook are actually building now #
The reconstituted project team has been quiet by the standards of a proposal this size. There have been no major public financing announcements, no updated FEED contract awards, and no revised cost estimates released to media as of the time I’m writing this. What is public comes largely from the Australian Infrastructure Commission’s project tracking and from NT government statements.
The broad parameters of the project appear to remain: large-scale solar on the Barkly region pastoral land north of Tennant Creek, HVDC cable routing through Indonesian waters (which requires bilateral treaty work), and a landing point in Singapore. The generation scale may have been revised downward from the original 20 GW headline figure — sources familiar with the restructure have indicated the initial stage is likely to be considerably more modest — but no official revised specification has been published.
Singapore’s Energy Market Authority conditionally approved a framework for importing up to 4 gigawatts of low-carbon electricity by 2035, under an initiative that had been progressing through the mid-2020s. That policy signal matters enormously for the PowerLink’s commercial case: without a willing buyer with a regulatory path to purchase, there’s no project. But conditional approval of a framework is not a signed offtake agreement, and that distinction matters when you’re talking about financing something of this scale.
The NT government has remained publicly supportive. Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro’s government has cited the PowerLink as part of the territory’s economic development pitch, and the Commonwealth’s ARENA has previously funded feasibility work on the broader concept of Australian renewable energy exports to Asia, though I am not aware of any new ARENA commitment to the Grok-Quinbrook vehicle specifically.
What’s actually holding this up #
Several things, none of them trivial.
The cable routing is the most underappreciated constraint. Running HVDC subsea cable from Darwin to Singapore means transiting Indonesian territorial waters and exclusive economic zones. That requires a bilateral cable landing agreement — a treaty-level instrument — between Australia and Indonesia, and separately between Indonesia and Singapore. Negotiations of this kind typically take years and are sensitive to the broader diplomatic relationship. Neither government has announced a concluded agreement.
Then there’s financing. A project past $30 billion — probably higher now given material and labour cost inflation since the original estimate — cannot be financed by two private equity sponsors alone. It needs development finance institutions, export credit agencies, and likely some form of government concessional debt. The Commonwealth’s CEFC has broad clean energy mandate powers, but committing to a project of this scale would be unprecedented. Getting multilateral development banks aligned with private capital and offtake counterparties simultaneously is the kind of thing that takes a decade on a good run.
And the offtake side: Singapore’s electricity market is not structured the same way as the NEM. Securing a long-dated power purchase agreement with a Singaporean utility or the government itself, at a price that makes the cable economics work, is a commercial negotiation happening in parallel with every other constraint above.
For comparison, big battery projects in the NEM — like the ones Akaysha Energy has been building with BlackRock’s backing — are complex enough to finance at a few hundred megawatts. The PowerLink is asking investors to commit to infrastructure orders of magnitude larger, across multiple sovereign jurisdictions, with no comparable precedent.
Why the grid case for this project is genuinely mixed #
Here’s my mild contrarian read: the Australia-Asia PowerLink is often framed as an Australian energy export story, which it is, but it’s sometimes also spruiked as part of Australia’s domestic energy transition. Those two things are largely separate. The NT solar farm would generate electricity destined for export, not for the NEM. Darwin is not electrically connected to the NEM’s main grid — it sits on the Darwin-Katherine Interconnected System, managed by Power and Water Corporation, which is isolated from the eastern grid. So this project does essentially nothing for consumers in Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane.
That’s not a reason to oppose it. Generating export revenue and creating construction jobs in the Territory are legitimate policy goals. But let’s not conflate it with solutions to reliability and affordability questions in the south-eastern grid, where the real firming debate is happening — as covered in the pumped hydro versus big batteries firming analysis we published earlier this year.
What the PowerLink does potentially do is establish Australia as a credible renewable energy exporter to Asia, which has long-run geopolitical and economic value that’s hard to price but real. Singapore is a demonstration market. If the cable works, other South-East Asian buyers watch closely.
The realistic timeline question #
I asked a project finance contact who has worked on Asian infrastructure what they made of the timeline. Their view, offered without attribution, was that first power to Singapore before the mid-2030s would require everything to go right simultaneously — approvals, treaties, financing, construction — starting essentially now. Nothing I’ve seen in the public record suggests that pace of progress.
The Capacity Investment Scheme, which I’ve looked at in terms of how it allocates risk across generation types, is not structured to support an export cable anyway. That’s a Commonwealth tool for domestic firming and dispatchable capacity. The PowerLink would need its own bespoke support structure if government wanted to underwrite it.
My read, sitting here in mid-2026: the Grok-Quinbrook consortium has kept the project from dying, which is genuinely hard to do after administration. The technical concept remains sound. But the gap between concept and financial close is still vast, and the timeline slippage since the original 2020s projections has been significant. Projects of this ambition often spend a decade in development before they either get built or quietly disappear. The PowerLink is somewhere in that long middle.
My veggie patch has been a write-off this winter — cold snaps, bad timing — and I reckon the PowerLink and I have something in common right now: the conditions aren’t quite right yet, but the underlying idea isn’t wrong.
Whether the Grok-Quinbrook vehicle can bring all of the financing, treaty, and offtake threads together is the question the project’s next two or three years will answer. Watch for the Indonesian cable landing agreement above everything else. That one moves first, or this doesn’t move at all.
External references: Singapore Energy Market Authority — Regional Power Trade framework; ARENA research and project funding — official publications.
— Priya Nair, Solar & Distributed Energy Correspondent
Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash