Snowy 2.0: A monument to this nation’s energy policy hubris - The Australian

The Australian reports that Snowy 2.0, Australia's flagship pumped hydro energy storage project, has become a cautionary tale of policy overreach. The scheme, designed to store renewable energy and provide dispatchable power, has faced mounting cost blowouts, timeline delays, and engineering challenges that have transformed it from solution into symbol of the nation's inability to plan major energy infrastructure coherently.

Where this fits

Snowy 2.0 illustrates the hidden whole-system cost of a renewables-dependent grid. Pumped hydro is firm power, exactly what a high-renewables grid needs, yet the project's ballooning expense and delays expose how expensive and difficult it is to retrofit firming into a system built around weather-dependent sources. This is not an accident of project management. It is the arithmetic of trying to solve intermittency after committing to the primary source. A firm backbone, built first, would have eliminated the need for this costly add-on.

What it means

Australia is locking itself into an energy strategy that demands ever-larger, ever-more-costly infrastructure to compensate for the physics of solar and wind. Each delay to Snowy 2.0 means more reliance on gas plants for firming, higher wholesale volatility, and greater exposure to fuel price shocks. The project's troubles also reveal the opportunity cost: capital and political will spent on retrofitting firming could have secured a low-carbon firm grid from the outset. Instead, Australia is building expensive, weather-dependent generation on a supply chain owned by China, while a proven, low-emission firm alternative, nuclear, remains legally foreclosed.