Atlassian CEO's bonkers scheme to pipe electricity from Australia to Singapore collapses
A plan backed by Atlassian co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes – aimed at providing 15 percent of Singapore's electricity needs using solar energy generated in Australia – has collapsed.of solar panels capable of generating 3.2 gigawatts in Australia's Northern Territory, storing the output in a giant battery near the city of Darwin, then piping it 4,000km through an undersea cable to Singapore.
A giant battery is also doable, and Cannon-Brookes has experience on such a project: he and Elon Musk famously worked together in 2017 to install a 150MW battery in the state of South Australia. The battery has worked well since, helping the state to capitalize on investments in wind turbines. Infrastructure Australia – a government body that assesses the viability and worthiness of infrastructure projects –That assessment was vindicated four months later, in October 2022, when Singaporean energy buyers signed up for as much juice as the AAPL could carry, and then some.
But that enthusiasm all but ignored the project's enormous complexity. The solar farm and battery would have been the world's largest, meaning lots of opportunities for cost blowouts and unforeseen challenges.