In Elliott, a Stuart Highway roadhouse town of a few hundred people (approx.) on the edge of the Barkly Tablelands, locals have watched survey crews and construction contractors cycle through nearby Powell Creek Station since 2019, each visit carrying the same pitch: the world's largest solar farm, built on this old cattle country, would turn the Northern Territory into a clean-energy exporter and put thousands of workers through town. That pitch has since survived a public falling-out between two of Australia's richest men, a collapse into insolvency, a billionaire buyout, and three changes of Northern Territory government. It has not yet survived contact with a signed final investment decision. Nearly seven years after the project was unveiled, the power that is meant to one day flow from Powell Creek to Darwin, and from Darwin under the sea to Singapore, remains unfinanced — and the government now marketing it as the Territory's economic future is the same government that, in March 2025, tore up the only renewable-energy target it had.
What the government did
Sun Cable Pty Ltd was founded in 2018 and grew, with backing from Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and Fortescue chair Andrew Forrest, into a proposal to build a roughly 12,000-hectare (approx.) solar farm and battery installation at Powell Creek Station near Elliott, run an 800-kilometre overhead transmission line to Gunn Point near Darwin, and lay the world's longest subsea cable onward to Singapore — the Australia-Asia PowerLink, or AAPowerLink (Northern Territory Environment Protection Authority, Australia-Asia PowerLink Project assessment register; Infrastructure Australia, project evaluation). By September 2021 the backers had expanded the ambition to 20 gigawatts of solar and up to 42 gigawatt-hours of battery storage, at an estimated construction cost of $30-35 billion (approx.).
The ambition outran the financing. In January 2023, Sun Cable entered voluntary administration after Cannon-Brookes and Forrest fell out publicly over the company's direction and a funding round Forrest declined to back. Administrators from FTI Consulting ran a sale process, and in May 2023 a consortium led by Cannon-Brookes' Grok Ventures, with Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners, won the bid to buy the company's assets — unsecured creditors were paid in full, and the project relaunched under new, more concentrated ownership (FTI Consulting, Sun Cable voluntary administrators' reports, 2023). The Northern Territory's Labor government, under Chief Ministers Gunner, Fyles and Lawler in succession, backed the project throughout, granting it Major Project Status and running it through the NT EPA's assessment process.
Lia Finocchiaro's Country Liberal Party won government at the 24 August 2024 election, ending eight years of NT Labor rule, and inherited Sun Cable at that relaunched stage rather than creating it. Her government has continued to support the project: the NT EPA completed its environmental impact assessment and issued a conditional environmental approval on 24 June 2024, and in July 2025 the federal government renewed AAPowerLink's Major Project Status on the Finocchiaro government's watch, by then describing a narrowed scope of up to 6 gigawatts and a cost of more than $40 billion (approx.) (major project status renewal reporting, July 2025). What is squarely the Finocchiaro government's own decision, made seven months into office, is different. On 27 March 2025, Mining and Energy Minister Gerard Maley scrapped the Territory's legislated target of 50% renewable electricity generation by 2030 — a target Labor had set in 2016 and never got close to meeting — calling it "reckless" and citing a Treasury costing of up to $5 billion (approx.), or roughly $56,000 per Territory household (approx., calculated per Jacana Energy customer), to hit it by the deadline (Northern Territory Government, Minister for Mining and Energy, media statement, 27 March 2025). In its place the government set three "strategic priorities" — affordability, security and reliability — without publishing a replacement percentage target, alongside a 3% cap on retail price rises and a push to fast-track the Beetaloo Sub-basin's shale gas reserves, including new pipelines and petroleum legislation introduced in 2026 to accelerate approvals.
The strongest case
A resource-rich, sparsely populated Territory has a genuine shot at becoming an energy exporter, and gas keeps the lights on while it tries
Take the government's argument on its own terms. The Northern Territory combines two things almost nowhere else does at this scale: some of the best solar resource on Earth across the Barkly Tablelands, and a landmass so lightly populated that a 12,000-hectare solar farm barely registers against the size of a single cattle station. AAPowerLink's environmental approval, its renewed federal Major Project Status, conditional import approval from Singapore's Energy Market Authority, and a narrower, more bankable 6-gigawatt scope are all evidence the project has matured since its near-death in 2023, not evidence it has stalled. Project figures put peak construction employment at roughly 1,750 jobs and 350 ongoing roles over a 70-year operating life (approx.) — in a Barkly and Katherine region with few large employers outside pastoral stations, mining and the public service, that is a genuine, geographically concentrated opportunity. On gas, the government's logic is at least internally consistent: Territory Generation's ageing, mostly gas- and diesel-fired fleet supplied roughly four-fifths of NT electricity in 2024, Beetaloo gas is available now rather than in the 2030s, and a government responsible for keeping the lights on through wet-season peak demand has a real obligation to secure supply on a timeframe it can actually deliver, rather than commit Territorians to a 2030 target that, on Treasury's own costing, would have added tens of thousands of dollars to the average household's share of the bill. Backing an export dream and a domestic gas build-out at once is not obviously incoherent: one is a decade-scale bet on future export income, the other is what keeps air conditioners running next wet season.
The evidence
The primary record shows two things at once: a Territory that remains almost entirely dependent on gas for its own power, and an export project whose ambition has shrunk even as its price tag has grown. Territory Generation, the NT government-owned corporation supplying most Territorians' power, operates eight mainly gas- and diesel-fired stations with a combined installed capacity of 593 megawatts (approx.), plus roughly 5.1 megawatts of contracted supply from independent producers, only 4.1 megawatts of which is solar (Territory Generation, Annual Report 2023-24, tabled in the NT Legislative Assembly, 22 October 2024). Commonwealth energy statistics — the same figures the NT government itself cited when scrapping the renewables target — put gas at roughly 83% (approx.) of NT electricity generation in the 2024 calendar year and renewables at under 20% (Australian Government, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, Australian Energy Statistics, states and territories data).
Sun Cable's own trajectory has moved in the opposite direction from the "more real than ever" framing. At its most ambitious, in September 2021, the company was promising 20 gigawatts of solar and a $30-35 billion (approx.) build. After the 2023 administration and relaunch, the scope under renewed Major Project Status is up to 6 gigawatts (approx.) — under a third of the original — while the price tag has grown to more than $40 billion (approx.). The final investment decision, the point at which financing is actually locked in rather than promised, is now targeted for 2027; construction is not expected to start until late 2028 or early 2029; and first power to Darwin is not expected before the early 2030s, with Singapore power some years after that (Infrastructure Australia, Australia-Asia PowerLink evaluation; FTI Consulting, project case summary).
The critique
The gap between the government's "clean energy superpower" framing and its own funded, legislated actions is the clearest evidence in the record. Every concrete step the Finocchiaro government has taken with its own money and legislative program in its first two years — finalising the Sturt Plateau Pipeline permit for APA to carry Beetaloo gas onto the grid from 2026, passing 2026 legislation to accelerate Beetaloo approvals, and continuing to back the Middle Arm Sustainable Development Precinct — locks in gas infrastructure with a start date inside this term of government. Every step attached to the renewable superpower vision — AAPowerLink's 2027 final investment decision, late-2028 construction start, and early-2030s first power — sits at least one, and in Singapore's case two, terms of government away, funded by private capital that has not yet closed and by Indigenous land-use agreements with Barkly Traditional Owners that were still unresolved as at the mid-2025 Major Project Status renewal. A government is entitled to back a long-dated bet; it is a different thing to market that bet as the reason a costed, near-term domestic target had to go.
Middle Arm sharpens the contradiction rather than resolving it. The NT government markets the roughly 1,500-hectare (approx.) Darwin Harbour precinct as part of the Territory's "sustainable" energy future, pointing to planned hydrogen and battery components, but its first confirmed tenant is Tamboran Resources, a Beetaloo gas developer planning a gas processing plant on the site — a fact a Senate Environment and Communications References Committee inquiry into the $1.5 billion (approx.) in federal funding for the precinct could not resolve into a unanimous recommendation, with Greens and crossbench senators calling for the funding to be withdrawn and Traditional Owners telling the inquiry the precinct would be built without their consent (Senate Environment and Communications References Committee, Middle Arm Sustainable Development Precinct inquiry, report tabled 2024). And even if AAPowerLink clears its 2027 financing hurdle, its DarwinLink transmission line feeds Darwin and an export cable, not the Katherine or Alice Springs systems that also depend on Territory Generation's ageing gas fleet — so the project that best fits the "clean energy superpower" story does the least, of anything in this record, to green the Territory's own day-to-day power supply before the 2030s at the earliest.
The government's funded, legislated gas projects arrive this term. Its clean-energy superpower arrives, on its own latest timeline, at least two terms from now.
The risk to the future
Two decade-scale bets, only one of them costed, running at once
The Territory now has two energy futures running in parallel without a single published document that reconciles them. Treasury could cost the abandoned 50% renewables target down to a precise per-household figure, precise enough to justify scrapping it in one media statement, yet no comparably detailed public costing exists for the Territory's cumulative, decades-long exposure to underwriting Beetaloo pipeline infrastructure, Middle Arm precinct works and Territory Generation's ageing fleet all at once, while AAPowerLink's private financiers separately decide whether the scaled-down, 6-gigawatt project is bankable enough to reach the 2027 final investment decision it has already slipped past once. If AAPowerLink slips again — and its record since 2018 is one delay, one insolvency and one two-thirds scope cut already — the Territory will have spent this term locking in gas infrastructure with genuine long-run emissions and reputational consequences, in support of an export project that has not yet reached the point where its own backers are willing to commit their capital.
For towns like Elliott, the risk is more immediate than a fiscal ledger. Communities near Powell Creek Station have now been promised jobs and investment through one insolvency, one billionaire buyout and three governments; each slip in the timeline defers the payoff by years without changing the pitch. A Territory government is entitled to hedge between a long-dated export bet and near-term gas supply. It is harder to defend hedging by cancelling the one commitment on the table that was actually costed, legislated and due this decade — a domestic renewables target — while the multi-decade gas commitments and the still-unfinanced solar export dream both proceed unchecked.