Saw this recently. $23B, plus the usual cost overruns of 25-50%, let’s say $35B actual total cost.
Including the geopolitical unreliability of depending on another country for upto 15-20% of your total power needs, and the cable passing through other countries, basically a risky proposition for Singapore.
Instead of the cable, how sensible and feasible would a plan be to ship electrical power instead?
A gigantic ULCC of 20,000 TEU capacity, loaded with batteries, that are charged in a port on Australia, and then sail to Singapore.
Assuming the battery storage is the newest CATL stationary battery storage which is 500Wh/kg at cell level and 400Wh/kg at pack level, containerized solution.
A standard 20ft shipping container has a maximum gross weight of 24000kg. That means a single battery container can be 12MWh.
20,000 TEU can be as huge as 240,000 MWh. 240GWh. In 2022 Singapore generated 57.1TWh of electricity. A single such ship could carry approximately 0.4% of Singapore’s annual consumption. I’d Singapore builds a separate port terminal to be able to dock 5 such ships at once, you’ll have enough power to meet 2% of Singapore’s annual electrical consumption.
With all the taxes, Singaporean power is averaged to USD 0.25/kWh. Wholesale power is somewhere around $0.18/kWh.
Would all the investment in port infrastructure, ship building, battery costs, solar farms, and infrastructure required at Australian end be worth it?
Can this be replicated elsewhere? For example, Saudi Arabia, Sahara Desert? What about inland in United States? Power generated in Nevada and Arizona could be put in containerized battery storage solutions and shipped to, say North-East on rail?
This question is due to the risks geopolitical and especially in US the NIMBY-ism regarding power transmission lines that are needed to bring power from where it is generated to where it is needed.
What if we don’t need those transmission lines, and just use up the current transport infrastructure to ‘ship’ electricity instead?
Source: Ok-Pea3414
4 Comments
It’s not really. You would need these ships arriving every 80 hours like clockwork to replace the power delivery of the proposed cable. The much more sensible solution would be to look at generation closer to home like in Malaysia and Indonesia rather than piping power all the way from Australia.
Malaysia currently has a block on selling renewable energy to Singapore ostensibly to meet their own green energy goals but imo it’s much more sensible to sell it to Singapore and let them finance your green energy transition for you. Unfortunately the relationship between Malaysia and Singapore is complicated so that’s a roadblock.
There are proposed connections to Indonesia but they’re in various stages of permitting/financing and the Indonesia government doesn’t have a strong track record of following through on projects. Additionally Indonesia has a ton of coal on the grid and very little solar/wind and they probably need any they can build for their own climate commitments. Again letting Singapore help fund your transition seems smart to me.
I don’t think it’s as crazy an idea as some might assume at first glance.
To get the pack level energy density kwhkg and kwh/liter it helps that such a massive battery would not discharge conceivably in a short time, so your design can be a bit more power dense. I wouldn’t look at moving shipping containers for grid power, it’s a lot of extra handling expense and we’d like to be gentle on the batteries. For safety reasons such a ‘charge ship’ would likely have cells contained in isolated hull compartments each water cooled by sea water pumped to heat exchangers, and which can double as a thermal runaway and smoke suppression system with venting out of dedicated exhausts which probably would use water particle smoke filtration.
As charge and discharge cycles wouldn’t be excessively fast, the cell design can emphasise more energy density and cost over power density and have longer life, so the requirements are a bit different to automotive fast charging.
So, the ‘charge ship’ would also power itself. We save mass and volume from not needing a giant marine diesel.
Energy requirement becomes a bit more relevant, compared to the 12 or so kWh/kg for oil, and that translating to useful energy in power plants at 4 to 7kWh kg, and obviously it’s a bit different with LNG taking into account tanks and insulation, but let’s say they get something like that as usefull power, there are comparatively around 10x the transport costs, and that is both in energy and in trips, so it’s significant. On the other hand, you can use electricity that is very cheap at the source and have almost no conversion loss.
It’s main value comes from being large enough to meet any regional power requirement fluctuation to which ever network it connects to, emergency power supplies, being self powered.
The energy cost of transporting the energy can be mitigated by travelling slower (this has a large energy impact), using larger ships and taking advantage of various techniques that may be possible when you travel slower and have electric propulsion, like higher aspect propellers since power requirement is greatly reduced by modest speed reductions, reduced blade loading or something like that. But this means less ship transits and so higher capital costs if you need more ships.
> How possible is having battery loaded ships instead?
I think it is possible but more a capital tradeoff base on the cost of mooring a ship versus leasing or buying the real estate further inland.. If the question was about transporting energy via batteries from one country to another that is a question about the transportation costs versus the same question of real estate. i know Singapore is a small crowed Island and do not know the availability of land for solar panels?
Grid storage is still 3-400 USD/kWh. If we use the same cost for your proposal (though we don’t have to move the inverters around), your 240 GWh will cost 72-96 billion USD.
That is already 3-4x the 23 billion USD for the cable. And this is just the batteries for one ship. How many of those sets of batteries do you need to have in circulation to keep an uninterrupted delivery of electricity?