Seriously, you either have no ability to discern or no willingness to be discerning or honest.
Andrew Bolt is a paid gun for hire ... the more he sprays his blunderbuss the more he gets paid ... and if you didn’t realise, he is a paid up member of a small clique of conservatives on a mission to burden Australia with their hateful minority views !
Some facts:
The initial estimate for Snowy 2.0 was something like $2-2.5 bill was clearly stated as preliminary.
The initial announcements also clearly stated the Federal Government was prepared to buy NSW and Vic out of their share of Snowy 1.0 provided each state was prepared to commit to reinvesting proceeds into infrastructure. It was clear that such buyout was not included in the preliminary construction estimate.
I recall in press at the time of initial announcements that the preliminary construction estimate did not include upgrades for transmission lines to Sydney and Melbourne.
There was enough early promise the Federal Government committed to detailed investigation costing $29 mill, a significant portion of which went to a series of expensive fully cored boreholes to depths of up to 1km, the rest on consultant specialists capable of reaching informed technical, commercial and feasibility assessments.
Today the released study concludes Snowy 2.0 is technically and financially viable, offering an estimated 8% return on investment assuming an updated construction estimate of $3-3.5 bill, a first presented estimate of $2-2.5 bill for transmission line upgrades, and I presume something like $6 bill to buy Snowy 1.0
For their proposed investment, Federal Government gets to own a reliable, long life infrastructure asset that gives them operating control and the power to curb the worst of the supply/price gaming clearly being undertaken by existing generators across south-east Australia ... in short the federal government and all future federal governments have the ability to influence electricity supply, reliability and pricing without I presume contravening conditions of all prior privatisations.
For the costings outlined in 5. above, the NSW government can not even construct the WestConnex Motorway in Sydney ... so perspective please. Unlike The Snowy 1.0/2.0 deal, WestConnex does not deliver an 8% return on investment ... so perspective please. And whilst WestConnex does enable significant, interconnected transport benefits and a +ve return on investment it does not get to power up 500,000 homes supporting 1-1.5 million people for hour after hour at critical times and it does not get to dampen power bills to those home owners and it does not get to enable greater penetration of renewables powergen ... so perspective please.
Andrew Bolt could be called to task, torn into shreds and completely discredited by ANYONE reading today’s report and being prepared to put this project in context. But more likely, nobody will question Bolt and in a few days he’ll move on to his next piece of intentional, agenda driven misinformation.
