In April this year, Professor Bruce Mountain and former energy executive Ted Woodley warned that Snowy Hydro 2.0 could ultimately cost $42 billion, comprising direct construction costs of $20 billion, transmission infrastructure costs totalling $12 billion and interest charges of $8 billion over 15 years:
They said that Snowy 2.0 was a “dreadful idea” from the outset and called it “one of the biggest disasters” in Australian infrastructure history. They also called for a royal commission into the troubled project.
Woodley cautioned that Snowy 2.0 is causing significant environmental damage to the Kosciuszko National Park. “It involves the dumping of tens of millions of cubic metres of spoil from the tunnelling, and that’s going in the park, just being dumped in the park”, he said, adding that 150 kilometres of new roads and tracks have now been constructed through the protected area.
The full text of this article is available to MacroBusiness subscribers
