Snowy profits steady amid pumped hydro strains, while CEO Barnes sees his take-home benefits sink below $2 million

Snowy Hydro reported EBITDA of $756.8 million for 2025-26, a 6% increase, while releasing a revised cost estimate for Snowy 2.0 of up to $25 billion and pushing full commissioning to late 2029. The 2.2-gigawatt pumped hydro project, now subject to repeated cost reforecasts by its contractor Future Generation Joint Venture, has prompted CEO Dennis Barnes to describe the latest blowout as "very disappointing". The company cited the project's "unique nature", "level of risk and technical complexity", and the contractor's "cost estimation challenges" in accounting for the expanded budget.

Where this fits

Snowy 2.0 is a firm, dispatchable storage project meant to anchor Australia's renewable-heavy grid, yet it has become a textbook case of cost and schedule creep in major energy infrastructure. The $25 billion figure, now the working assumption five years into construction, reflects the genuine complexity of firming a weather-dependent system. This is not a failure of the storage concept; it is evidence that firming costs money, time, and engineering rigour, and that these costs belong in any honest accounting of the transition's full price.

What it means

Australia is betting heavily on a single, ballooning pumped hydro scheme to provide the dispatchable backbone for a grid increasingly dependent on wind and solar. Delay and cost blowout on Snowy 2.0 leave the grid more exposed to weather volatility and more reliant on temporary gas-plant extensions while that storage matures. The firming challenge is real and expensive; the question Australia has not answered is whether nuclear, banned by law, might deliver the same service at lower total cost and with no schedule risk.