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I'm unsure about Indonesia, but domestic customers in that region would be pretty limited. The closest major power users would be in Queensland (>1000km) away.
by rv3392 2y ago
I'm unsure about Indonesia, but domestic customers in that region would be pretty limited. The closest major power users would be in Queensland (>1000km) away.
- gonzo41 2y agoData Centers, Green Steel production. Power == Opportunities. This is such a massive win for the environment.
- bobthepanda 2y agoYou need water for all of that and that part of Australia is pretty arid.
- tdrz 2y agoWith cheap energy, desalination might make economic sense for Australia.
- boffinAudio 2y agoMight finally provide a viable use for the Ord River catchment, though ..
- eru 2y agoFor that, you'd need to make massive investments in a part of that world that has mostly untouched nature. It might or might not be a good idea. But you need to then compare those massive investments to the relatively modest investment of the power cable to bring the electricity to a part of that world that already has all the other infrastructure needed, and also already has lots of water.
- bigiain 2y agoI did a little back of the envelope calculation in a discussion here last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220499 If Australia refined _all_ of the 40,000kt of Bauxite we export each year into "frozen electricity" Aluminium, that'd only require about 600GWh, or about 4% of the 1.7GW 24x7, or 15,000GWh per year this would send to Singapore. Large datacenter are in the 100MW sort of range, so only single digit GWh per year. Australia generates a few hundred TWh per year. 272 TWh in 2021/22 - or 272,000GWh, around 20 times what this project will export to Singapore. Data centers and Aluminium and Iron smelters are big electricity consumers. But they barely even move the needle compared to cities with millions of households.
- Rastonbury 2y agoIf you count those 2 maybe but those aren't the only industrial. Residential consumption is 33% and industrial is 46% in Indonesia. The mix is similar for most countries https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233761/indonesia-electricity-consumption-by-sector/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233761/indonesia-electr...
- bobthepanda 2y agoAustralia famously is not a good place to manufacture anyways because the “resource curse” makes AUD expensive and exports noncompetitive.
- worthless-trash 2y agoCan you expand on this, I don't see how it can be.
- bobthepanda 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease Natural resource sales send USD to Australia. AUD is now worth more because it is backed by more USD. Manufactured exports are also traded in USD, so Australian exports become much more expensive because workers and local materials are paid for in AUD.
- philipkglass 2y agoApproximating bauxite as pure aluminum oxide [1], 40 million tons of bauxite contains about 21 million tons of aluminum. A ton of aluminum takes about 14 megawatt hours of electricity to produce [2]. That would be about 294,000,000 megawatt hours (294,000 gigawatt hours, or 294 terawatt hours) to turn Australia's bauxite exports into aluminum. Australia could easily double its electricity production/consumption to refine bauxite into aluminum metal instead of exporting the bauxite. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxide#Production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxide#Production [2] https://www.mining.com/web/aluminum-price-hits-13-year-high-as-energy-surge-pressures-supply/ https://www.mining.com/web/aluminum-price-hits-13-year-high-...