When Snowy 2.0 is in the news, it’s usually about money. The cost of the huge project has gone well beyond the initial A$6 billion estimate and will now cost more than $12 billion.
But cost overruns don’t affect the real value of this pumped hydro project. When it comes online – likely in 2028 – Snowy 2.0 will bring something fundamentally new to the Australian electricity system: energy storage at a scale far beyond anything else.
Amateurs… here in Tassie we would just build between 3 and 6 stadiums with that sort of money. The hardest part would be finding enough hideously inconvenient spots that have insufficient infrastructure and potentially contaminated soil to site them. We know how to piss money we don’t have away on White Elephants down here.