Australia news live: Nick Kyrgios to face police questions over Melbourne e-scooter ride

Billionaire biffo still bubbling along

Last week, we had the high-profile falling out of billionaires Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest and Mike Cannon-Brookes over their proposal for huge solar farms in northern Australia, the signature one intended to help power Singapore via a cable.

MCB, the Atlassian co-founder, has spoken up a couple of times in favour of Sun Cable’s main project – the $30bn Australia-Asia PowerLink.

While we haven’t heard directly from an unusually media-shy Forrest, the iron ore baron’s Squadron Energy has been piping up.

John Hartman, Squadron’s chairman, says the link to Singapore “is not commercially” based on “a comprehensive technical and financial analysis”.

“However, Squadron Energy continues to believe in the vision for a gamechanging solar and battery project in the North Territory’s Barkly region, including the proposed connection to Darwin,” Hartman said.

As Australia’s largest renewable energy company, Squadron Energy is best placed to help Australia become a green energy exporting superpower by generating renewable energy to produce green hydrogen and green ammonia.

We’ve asked for comment from Grok, the family investment arm of Cannon-Brookes, including whether other parts of Sun Cable’s plans have a better chance of succeeding.

Perhaps it makes more sense to build the giant solar farm to supply Darwin and build in the ability to scale up the project later on, should the cable into south-east Asia become viable And Sun Cable has talked up its 11 gigawatts of other solar farms that it was working on. Perhaps they could survive the corporate restructuring too.

As we noted in this analysis piece last week, one challenge is that Singapore is fielding proposals from about two dozen other renewable projects that don’t have a 2km-deep Timor trench to skirt with a cable.

Doubters also suggest there have been some shifting goalposts on the part of Sun Cable’s budgets and forecasts, including just how much those subsea surveys will cost. Milestone targets were also being missed, so one side says.

With Sun Cable now placed in administration, it may only be a couple weeks before we know whether there are interested third-party suitors for elements or all of the business … and whether MCB or Twiggy will spend more of their money on Sun Cable’s potentially landmark projects.