Sun Cable: Mike Cannon-Brookes takes charge of ‘world-changing’ solar project

Billionaire says renewables will drive Australia’s next commodities boom as his Grok Ventures finalises acquisition

The tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes has renewed plans by the Sun Cable project to develop giant solar farms in inland Australia to supply electricity to Darwin – and to Singapore via an undersea cable.

Grok Ventures, the private investment company of Cannon-Brookes, on Thursday finalised its acquisition of Sun Cable, months after a dispute between its billionaire backers threatened to derail the huge solar project.

The company said Sun Cable was “well-progressed and in a strong position to deliver the AAPowerLink project” to Singapore via Indonesia. It planned to lodge a submission to Singaporean authorities as soon as this month to supply power to the island state.

“The next commodities boom in this country will not be founded on coal,” Cannon-Brookes told a media call. “It will be founded on the generation and export of our renewable energy. Sun Cable is a world-changing project.”

Sun Cable retained its earlier plans to supply electricity from a solar farm in the Northern Territory to Darwin by 2030 and by the early 2030s for Singapore. Costs remain confidential.

Doubts about the viability of a project touted to cost $30bn or more, and involving an undersea cable of 4,300km in length, were confirmed earlier this year when Sun Cable was placed into administration. Cannon-Brookes and fellow billionaire and part-owner Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest also declared different objectives for the company.

Cannon-Brookes, a co-founder of Atlassian, beat Forrest in May for control of Sun Cable. He said Grok Ventures injected $65m into the company while it was in administration.

“We’re focused on investing in climate tech and climate transition to create a better tomorrow,” he said, adding that companies such as Sun Cable “can deliver major CO2 reduction and outsized investment returns”.

“Sun Cable’s projects are ambitious,” Cannon-Brookes said. “However, this ambition is proportionate to the challenges and opportunities of the renewable energy transition.

“So while I acknowledge some people might think it’s too ambitious, we don’t believe it is.

“Frankly, the technology exists to make this happen. We’re extremely confident that modern cable technology can reliably carry more electricity over long distances and through deeper waters than was possible in the past.”

All up the firm aims to develop a solar farm that would eventually swell to 6 gigawatts of renewable energy. A first stage would have 900 megawatts of capacity to supply Darwin. A cable capable of connecting Singapore with 1.75 gigawatts of power would later be built and connected.

There would also be “a significant amount of battery storage” to provide firming and electricity around the clock.

Sun Cable would expand to be able to supply another 3 gigawatts of power to Darwin – making it the world’s largest solar array.

Jeremy Kwong-Law, the chief executive of Grok Ventures, said the company had “a high degree of confidence” that Sun Cable and its power link would get the required funding as project milestones are reached. The company would also continue talks with the Indonesian government to obtain a licence to lay the cable through its territorial waters.

Grok Ventures said Sun Cable had already received expressed interest for about six-times its first supply to Darwin, and more customer interest in Singapore for as much as 2.5GW – or 1.5 times the cable’s capacity – of power.

Singapore’s government has a target to import at least 4GW of renewable sources by 2035.

Photograph: Brook Mitchell/Getty Images - Mike Cannon-Brookes on Thursday said the ambitiousness of Sun Cable is ‘proportionate to the challenges and opportunities of the renewable energy transition’.