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Clearing in the Snowy Mountains. Geoff Wise on Facebook, June 4th 2024
By Jo Nova
It’s just another day on the job to save the world from man-made pollution
In a quest to make the weather a bit nicer in 100 years these trees needed to be cut down now so we can connect up a big hydropower “battery” for holy solar and wind power. The towers will be 75m high and the path through the forest, 140m wide.
When we ran off coal and gas power, we didn’t need pumped hydro. Fossil fuels protect the forests and hills of Australia.
These photos were posted by Geoff Wise on the “High Country of Australia” show us what our clean green future will look like:
“Here is where the power lines from the Snowy Hydro 2, at Lobs Hole, will cross the Tumut River ravine to go to the recently cleared site of the switching station in the Maragle State Forest, before heading north to feed into the National Power grid. The power lines will come from near the distant horizon. Look at the photos for more information. You can see this for yourself, as I was […]
ABC News
By Jo Nova
It’s just emblematic of your Clean Green Future
Complexity and false hope is eating the crown of Australia’s Net Zero transition — the Snowy 2.0 Pumped Hydro scheme. Things have gone from “debacle” to Soviet Grade Industrial Fiasco. After Florence-the-tunnel-borer got stuck and created a sinkhole, workers spent seven months trying to shore up the ground, playing God against the mountain — pumping in grout, cement and polyurethane foam. But the foam made a gas so toxic the tunnel had to be evacuated. To make things worse the workers were originally told the gas was water vapor but it turned out to be isocyanate. At every point the Snowy Hydro team hid the bad news and issued propaganda, and it’s only taken the ABC a year to tell us the workers predicted the sinkhole, and three months to investigate the safety breach.
Still, that’s better than the NSW regulator who knows all the other safety breaches but won’t even share them, because it’s so bad ” it may affect the contractor’s reputation.” (Which it surely just did anyway.)
This is your low-carbon future. It was supposed to cost $2 billion but the bill […]
Supplied by Snowy Hydro
By Jo Nova
Australia’s star “Renewables BackUp” the Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme has been delayed another two years. The pumped storage mammoth looks more like a ghost elephant every day. When last we heard, Florence the hapless tunnel boring machine started on a 15 kilometer tunnel and carved through 150 meters of rock only to get stuck in some sand, where it is still stuck months later. Now the completion date has blown out to late 2029.
When it started in 2017 it was supposed to cost $2 billion, and be finished in four years. Now, if we include transmission lines, the cost is about $20 billion, and the four years has become twelve. Even the Greens leader Adam Bandt thinks it should be ditched. It’s that bad.
Paul Broad was the CEO of Snowy Hydro for ten years until August last year. So he managed one of Australia’s largest single generators for a decade. Now that he’s free to speak, he’s scathing about the renewables transition. On Thursday he spoke to Ben Fordham of 2GB radio making it clear what a fantasy project NetZero is:
“The notion that you’re going to […]
By Jo Nova
Tantangara Resevoir: A whole ecosystem to fill with invasive feral fish and a necrosis virus too.
The Snowy 2.0 Pumped hydro scheme will cost families big money, spread pests, endanger fish, and kill trees but it will allow some renewables investors to make a profit, and that’s all that matters right?
Overseas readers are invited to submit more stupid schemes, with points for delays, cost, incompetence, environmental damage and sheer lack of any public benefit.
Ted Woodley does the best synopsis of the Snowy 2.0 debacle I’ve seen, pointing out how it sets all the worst kinds of records, being delayed 300% with costs up 1000%. It was supposed to be built in four years and cost $2 billion, but will end up taking 12 years (at least) and probably cost $20 billion by the time the cost of the extra transmission lines is added in. As readers here know, the boring machines are the slowest on Earth, one having made it only 200m and being paused for months under a pile of sand.
It was supposed to pay for itself, and make electricity cheaper, but is already chewing through a $1.4 billion taxpayer “injection”, […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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