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Snowy 2.0 is the Trillion dollar Black Hole of Australia — sucking in energy, money, land, industrial relations, the dollar, our lifestyle

Image by Marcus from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

Coming over the event horizon — a project so bad it could break the nation

Snowy 2.0, the pumped hydro “battery” is far worse than we thought, and we thought it would destroy lakes, rivers, farms, cheap electricity and national productivity. But it’s worse than that. Now it’s been infected with Victorian Union style contract bombs, which will spread to all the attached transmission tentacle projects, and blow out their budgets too.

The government (us) is backing everything, guaranteeing profits for foreign companies and super sweet salary packages for union workers and the project is “too big to fail” and the debts promised for years to come. Imagine if you took witchcraft masquerading as science, hyped it with childish modeling, managed it with world class incompetence and mixed it with the worst union cartels, then locked it all into a 35 year contract. “Hey ho!”

For foreign readers, the CFMEU is the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union, which is being investigated for corruption that may have cost the Victorian government people some $15 billion dollars. In the words of the administrator the Victorian branch of the CFMEU was “no […]

June 23rd, 2026 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | | Comments (95)

Snowy 2.0 blows out 20 times to $42b — we could have built 4 nuclear plants instead

by Steve Hunter

By Jo Nova

Snowy 2.0 will stand as a monument to organized crime

Big Government is the ultimate racket. The costs have been hidden, the FOIs denied, the Unions are raking in the cash, and a foreign corporation is soaking in easy money. And in the end, the stored power is likely to be a horrible $200/MWh*, making it 6 times the price of brown coal plant power.

Malcolm Turnbull promised us it would cost $2b and take four years, and here we are, nine years later, with just $40 billion and three more years to go….

There is something in this project for every grifter. The incompetent management delays have added $8b in interest during construction. That will keep the Bankers happy. There are 3,000 extra workers nobody thought we’d need and they earn $250,000 each on average. And there is now $12 billion in interconnector high-voltage line costs. Like all “renewable” projects, the fuel is free but the cost to collect and distribute it burns like a magnesium flare.

Snowy Hydro 2.0 cost spirals to $42bn sparking calls for Royal Commission

By Tansy Harcourt, The Australian

The true cost […]

April 27th, 2026 | Tags: | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Coal power could have saved these trees: Clearing forest for Snowy Hydro transmission lines

 

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 […]

June 20th, 2024 | Tags: | Category: Australia, Big-Government, Global Warming, Hydroelectricity | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Snowy 2.0, doomed from the start — after the sinkhole came the poison gas, “worst major project in history”

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 […]

October 24th, 2023 | Tags: , , | Category: Australia, Big-Government, Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post Print This Post | |

“80% renewables by 2030 is Bullshit” says former Snowy Hydro CEO — transition will take 80 years, not 8

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 […]

May 5th, 2023 | Tags: , | Category: Big-Government | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Snowy 2.0 could win Prize for Most Globally Stupid Green Engineering Project

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”, […]

February 21st, 2023 | Tags: , | Category: Australia, Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |