Energy Insiders Podcast: Fast lane to electric, and Snowy blowouts

A podcast episode featuring Bruce Hardy from the Energy Futures Foundation discusses fast-tracking electric transport and recent cost blowouts and delays at Snowy Hydro's pumped storage project. The episode touches on Snowy 2.0, which has announced another cost and schedule revision, and sits alongside reporting that the project is now worth more than $25 billion.

Where this fits

Snowy 2.0 is the lynch-pin of Australia's renewables-firming strategy. It is supposed to store wind and solar output and release it on demand, converting weather-dependent generation into dispatchable power. Repeated cost blowouts and delays on the single largest firming asset underscore a hard truth about renewable grids: the firming infrastructure that makes them work is capital-intensive, long-lead, and prone to overrun. This is not a glitch in the transition plan. It is the cost of the plan itself.

What it means

Australia has bet the grid on the idea that renewable generation plus pumped hydro and battery storage can replace firm coal and gas at manageable cost. Snowy's trajectory, climbing past $25 billion, missing milestones, reveals the real bill of that bet. Every dollar spent on late, over-budget firming is a dollar that could have procured firm, low-material, long-lived nuclear generation, which Australia is legally prohibited from building. The grid will get firming. The question is whether it will be expensive and delayed, or cheaper and faster. So far, the chosen path has answered that.