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For those of us alive in the 1950s we well remember the building of Snowy 1.0. That was the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme. A grand project, built by optimistic people for an optimistic nation. Many immigrants found their way to the Snowy Mountains in southern New South Wales. We called them “New Australians” then, a term I find endearing and inclusive, and I rather wish we’d kept it. I don’t know any one of them disliked it, felt “triggered” or any such nonsense. For the most part they were grateful for well-paid work in the fresh Alpine air of their adopted land.
The headquarters for this grand project was the town of Cooma, an hour out of Canberra, where I spent my youth on return from five years in Italy. Unable to speak English at the time, I too shared the immigrant experience, put in a class at Ainslie Primary School for “New Australians”.
And thus was born the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric scheme, giving us clean green renewable electricity to this day.
We all loved the Snowy Scheme. Still do. So we were all well disposed to an expansion.
And so to Malcolm’s Snowy 2.0. When he announced it I thought: “wonderful!”
Great idea. And it may still be. Although there are problems. The first is cost blow-out, from $A 2 billion to $A 10 billion. That’s not counting the extra transmission lines needed. Cost blow-outs seem to be pretty much par for the course for big projects like this, so no surprise there, I guess. Then there are delays. Apparently a tunnel boring machine has been stuck in one of the tunnels for over a year.
The idea of Snowy 2.0 is not so much to provide more deliverable power as to provide back up. Like a huge battery. Water will be pumped from the lower dam (Talbinga, 540m asl) into the higher dam (Tantangara 1,200m asl) when renewables generate cheap and excess power. The water from Tantangara will be released down to Talbinga as needed, powering turbines on the way.
That’s still the concept. Just that it’s taking a lot longer and costing a lot more than predicted.
Funny that. Because that’s the very push-back on nuclear. Takes too long and costs too much.
Let’s have a look at the figures.
Nuclear power station: A 1GW nuclear power plant costs ~$US 10 billion and takes about 10 years to build. (China can do it in 6-8). This will produce around 8,322 GWh of power over a year (1GW x 8760 hours/year x 0.95 efficiency). 8,322 GWh is the same as 8,322,000 MWh per year.
Snowy 2.0 will cost around $US 10 billion and take about 10 years (my guess). That’s about the same time and cost as the 1GW nuclear power station.
According to snowyhydro.com.au:
Snowy 2.0 will provide an additional 2,000 megawatts of dispatchable, on-demand generating capacity and approximately 350,000 megawatt hours of large-scale storage to the National Electricity Market. To provide context, this is enough energy storage to power three million homes over the course of a week.
350,000 MWh in a week is 6,730 MWh per year (350,000 MWh divided by 52 weeks).
Nuclear divided by Snowy, MWh = 8322000/6730 = 1,236.
Which means that Nuclear has over 1,200 times more dispatchable electricity on an ongoing basis, than Snowy 2.0. Of course Snowy 2.0 will refill the dam, the same as recharging a battery. I don’t know how often this can be done over a year, but assume all that 350,000 MWh is available all the time, the maximum. Then Nuclear still has 24 times more dispatchable electricity than Snowy 2.0.
I’m not pushing here for Nuclear instead of Snowy 2.0. But just to put in perspective the fact the Nuclear produces more electricity, more regularly, as cleanly and safely, as Snowy 2.0 will, and does so at the same price and timeframe as Snowy 2.0. So let’s not continue saying that “Nuclear will take too long”, when we support alternatives that take as long or longer.
