The world is on the cusp of an power revolution that may make the Industrial Revolution look small. Mike Cannon-Brookes is banking on the Land Down Under to be a serious driver of that change.
The billionaire co-founder of software program large Atlassian plans for Australia, the place he grew up, to grow to be a hub for 2 of the most important renewable-energy tasks ever. According to Bloomberg, the SunCable challenge will construct a 20-gigawatt photo voltaic farm and a 4,300-kilometer undersea transmission cable, known as the Australia-Asia PowerLink.
But even he acknowledged that this $21 billion SunCable endeavor was an “absolute bat*** challenge.” However, this is step one in a 10-step define to transition clear power to Asia from one of the crucial common locations on Earth. This cable will run alongside the mattress of the Indian Ocean and feed Singapore’s large demand for electrical energy.
Australia produces 10,000 instances extra solar energy than it consumes, as reported by Bloomberg, despite the fact that it’s a coal behemoth and exports greater than any nation besides Indonesia.
It requires governments, firms, the wealthy and highly effective, and people to utterly take away from such soiled power sources, that are quickly warming the planet and resulting in extra intense and frequent storms, hearth, and different climate occasions.
Cannon-Brookes in contrast the power transition to the destruction of know-how, saying: “Everything has modified with a smartphone in a five-year interval.”
“Averting catastrophic local weather change requires an equally speedy change in society, together with altering how power is produced and delivered,” writes Brian Kahn. “In BloombergNEF’s net-zero situation, photo voltaic would be the world’s largest supply of unpolluted power by 2030. Getting there would require constructing the equal of the world’s largest photo voltaic farm each few days by the top of the last decade. “
The drawback is to say the least 70 years outdated, however the transfer was lastly made. The potential to generate profits and rewire economies will assist push us to the end line.
Fraser Thompson, who co-founded SunCable, now a Cannon-Brookes firm, instructed Bloomberg that the Asia-Pacific area might generate $490 billion a yr if solely 15% of renewable electrical energy crossed the border. border.
“Mike has been very public within the media selling the chance for Australia to be a frontrunner within the clear power transition,” Thompson mentioned.
There’s a protracted strategy to go — the ocean ground was nonetheless being mapped in April, the federal government needed to approve the photo voltaic farm, and not one of the cables have been constructed, in keeping with Bloomberg — however Australia -Asia PowerLink would be the large cornerstone. to a cleaner, safer future.
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