In 2017, I wrote an article printed in The Australian on the March 28, titled: Snowy Two: Turnbull’s pipe is full of holes.
My article was in response to our then-Prime Minister’s claim, ‘I am a nation-building Prime Minister and this is a nation-building project.’
He was introducing his latest thought bubble, which he proclaimed was Snowy 2.0. He went on to say this was the part of the Snowy Scheme that was never built and that for about $2 billion dollars this scheme would be the solution to our power needs. As we now know, both claims were wildly optimistic, as recent headlines show.
At the time, I wrote:
It was never part of the Snowy scheme. As Talbot pointed out, this scheme was considered and dismissed in the 1980s.
Estimates today are that Snowy 2.0 could cost more than $42 billion and then only be effective when the difference between peak and off-peak power is considerably greater than 20 per cent. Pumped hydro, even at its most efficient, uses 120 units of power to produce 100 units of power.
Despite the frailties of this ‘Pipe Dream’, successive governments have persisted with shovelling vast sums of taxpayer dollars into a seemingly bottomless hole or tunnel.
Questions of value for money and other more feasible projects do not appear to have been considered seriously enough. Why not? Isn’t that what our highly paid government is supposed to do? Should we not have bureaucrats that question every spending proposal, especially expenditure as large as this ‘Pipe Dream’…
The headlines about the cost blow-out should be an immediate wake-up call to our dozing Treasurer and the government.
Given that Snowy 2.0 is unlikely to produce cheap power or consistent power in the near future, it is my opinion that it should be reassessed. Maybe we could, with some refinements, turn it into the world’s biggest waterslide and send a politician down as the first fun seeker…
For far less than the $42 billion cost now suggested, we could have built the Upper Clarence Scheme, which consists of six dams and would produce over two and a half times more power than the whole Snowy Scheme. Low cost, always available, hydro power that can be turned on and off by a switch in Canberra. This project, which has been assessed and plans presented to the NSW government, would have the added advantages of stopping recurring flood damage and increasing productivity in the Clarence Valley. With the money left over we could build the Welcome Reef Dam on the Shoalhaven River and assure Sydney’s water supply for the foreseeable future.
Then, as a true nation building scheme, with similar benefits to the Snowy Scheme we could build Chowilla Dam on the lower Murray and assure our food supply for a century and more, with annual production worth over four billion dollars per year.
