Is Snowy 2.0 worth the price tag? | ABC Business Daily

Tks for this ep. I&#39;m not going to argue (much) with the strict ROI presented. Clearly the $ blowout lies somewhere along the scale of: unfortunate - regrettable - incompetent - corrupt, but a few (uninformed) points to mention:<br>- Saying only half the projected cost has been spent possibly underestimates the committed future costs payable when breaking contracts &amp; remediating the unfinished groundworks for safety if choosing to stop it now. Yes it&#39;s an &quot;addicted gampler&quot; line to throw good money after bad, but given the currently committed cost, I suspect we&#39;re better off finishing it &amp; getting 150 years of payoff rather than just useless holes &amp; waste concrete in the ground.<br>- Gridscale battery deployment during the life of this project has possibly diminished the business case, but battery life is much shorter &amp; they are all imported. Certainly Lithium battery chemistry doesn&#39;t like full or empty storage for any length of time, although future battery chemistry might be better? Snowy2 seems to offer the required seasonal storage ability missing in our grid now.<br>- Soaking up essentially free/waste renewables during prime renewable production windows means round-trip losses kinda cost nothing other than wear on the equipment?<br>- I actually like the sound of the top storage being oversized, thankyou. It can be incrementally filled over time when excess renewables are worthless, &amp; then released incrementally on demand when needed/profitable over time without having to be immediatly replenished.<br>- I don&#39;t know if was an intention of the project, but I see great value in it as a national (sorry WA) energy insurance policy, beyond the specific $ it might earn by &quot;selling high&quot;. No honest person expects to profit from prudent insurance investment, but it provides valuable confidence. Any thought of building new nuclear stations &amp; having to deal with the waste, rapid response coal/gas plants, storing bulk fuel for limited emergency grid generation, ... can hopefully fade away when we have this massive hydro battery which can be recharged without overpriced fuel imports or having to burn anything. Sweated coal plants can fail (as they do) without dramatically spiking the wholesale price for more than a moment. The switch to electrification domestically/industrially can confidently accelerate, renewable oversupply can be immediately stored, ... &amp; our national energy independence at times of, say, Middle Eastern or Eastern European war, or strategic ally/alliance failure, ... or whatever else might happen in the next 150 years, won&#39;t have to leave us exposed to the devastating econonomic/environmental/community impact it does today. Hard to put a price on all that in the long term when we seem incapable of thinking beyond construction timelines, but I recokon it&#39;ll prove to be quite valuable.

This bloke should be our energy minister he&#39;s all over it, since the inception of snowy hydro 2.0 i referred to it as Project Wishing Well. It will go down in history as one of the most monumental waste of money and resources projects this country has ever undertaken

Spot on analysis. When legacy megaprojects blow out to $25 billion with massive round-trip friction losses and complex, multi-year water scheduling headaches it proves why centralized dinosaur infrastructure is on the way out. Localized, modular solar, high-capacity battery storage, and distributed microgrids deliver autonomy and speed without the bureaucratic bloat and runaway price tags. Time to back what actually works on the ground.

And none of the costing includes the bolt on infrastructure to make it work Hume link, electric floor price built into wind farms and the community disruption and loss of country landscapes…. Renewable zealots gaslighting the Australian people making bank at future generations expense.

Very brave and completely agree.. I imagine the &quot;entertainment media&quot; is going to have a field day with PI&#39;s looking to character assassinate this guy and the threat he poses to that fat juicy tax payer cash cow. Can&#39;t have truth speaking to power, it might set a precedent for the next time their buddies get another neo-liberal gov.

If Snowy 2.0 were abandoned in favor of an alternative like grid-scale chemical batteries to provide the same 350 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of long-duration storage, it could cost up to three times more than the current projected cost of the pumped-hydro project.<br>With recent estimates placing the final cost of Snowy 2.0 between $22 billion and $25 billion, building an equivalent amount of battery storage could theoretically exceed $60 billion to $75 billion. Furthermore, because large-scale batteries typically have a lifespan of 10 to 15 years compared to Snowy 2.0&#39;s projected 150-year lifespan, those batteries would need to be replaced multiple times, significantly compounding the long-term costs.

It&#39;s not designed as a base load generator, it is a means to store the excess generation from renewables. Where it shines is useful life 5X that of batteries and inbuilt large scale capacity upfront to take advantage of and aid in the growth in renewables.

people said the same thing about the NBN and when the coalition got into government they decided to clip the wings and roll out a third rate solution which many people were not very happy with and consequently also lead to a price rise. The Tracker simple factor is once snowy 2.0 is rolled out eventually the grumble the grumps will quieten down and all the jibber jabber will be replaced with quite pride at the fact we have a high capacity battery that will never run out.

LNP signed up to Snowy Hydro, the Paris Agreement, Net Zero, AUKUS....now they have a change of mind? 😮<br>Maybe ask the British if <br>Hinkley Point C, located in Somerset, England, recognized as the most expensive nuclear power plant currently under construction globally, is worth it. Its projected final cost has escalated to approximately £48 billion in current value won&#39;t be completed until the 2030s after so many delays and will produce only 7% of total electricity needs. There is also a 2 billion pounds annual ongoing cost. The devil is always in the contract details...<br>&quot;UK energy bill payers will hand over £2bn a year in subsidies to EDF, the French company building two nuclear power stations, according to government figures.<br>EDF, owned by the French government, will be entitled to £1bn in annual payments as soon as Hinkley Point C, in Somerset, comes on to the grid in 2030s. The sum is due under the contracts-for-difference system that guarantees low-carbon energy companies a fixed price for the electricity they generate.<br>Separately, £1bn will be added to bills through a separate nuclear levy scheme to fund Sizewell C, in Suffolk, a 3.2 gigawatt (GW) project also led by EDF.&quot;