when is enough
is enough
and stop wasting OTHER people's money
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Former Snowy 2.0 boss says NetZero is ‘bullsh*t’
Australia’s “biggest renewables project”, Snowy Hydro 2.0, has turned into an absolute farce.
Latest reports are that one of its three tunnel boring machines, used to carve out a 15 kilometre tunnel through 150 meters of rock, has been ‘stuck’ in sand for fourteen months now, and no-one seems to know how to get it ‘unstuck’.
According to reports, it can’t go forwards, but it can’t go back either. The project team had installed concrete reinforcements behind the borer as it moved and so now it’s locked in.
Originally we were told the project would be finished by 2021.
That’s now blown out until ‘late 2029’ - maybe.
They also told us it would cost $2 billion.
The ‘all-up’ cost is now said to be closer to $20 billion, once you factor in the 1000km of transmission lines needed to link it to Sydney and Melbourne.
A staggering 900 percent increase!
Ted Woodley described the whole project as a “shambles” in The Australian over the weekend, saying it “doesn’t stack up economically, technically or environmentally”.
“Snowy 2.0 will be a very inefficient battery” he said, going on to slam the catastrophic environmental damage it had caused:
“Environmentally, vast construction sites and roads/tracks across 35km of Kosciuszko National Park have destroyed thousands of hectares of native alpine habitat. Twenty million tonnes of excavated spoil will be dumped in the Park and reservoirs, enough to cover a football field to a height of three kilometres”.
“Four 330kV transmission lines on two sets of 70-metre towers will traverse eight kilometres of the Park over a cleared easement swathe up to 140 metres wide. This will be the first time transmission lines are erected in a NSW national park for 50 years”.
Paul Broad, former CEO of Snowy Hydro, was just as scathing of the project in an interview with Ben Fordham last week.
Broad said the government wanted to run the plant on hydrogen that doesn’t exist.
“There is no hydrogen … and there won’t be for another 10, 20 years at the earliest”.
He also rubbished the whole NetZero agenda as a ‘complete fantasy’ based on ‘magical thinking’:
“The notion that you’re going to have 80 per cent renewables in our system by 2030 is, to use the vernacular, bullsh*t”.
“Eraring [Coal power station] CANNOT close…If the lights don’t go out, I’ll be awfully surprised” he said.
‘The truth is… this transition, if it ever occurs, will take 80 years… not eight.’
… https://www.theaustralian.com.au/.../8c033d88cec284e7f165... https://www.2gb.com/its-bullsht-former-snowy-2-0-boss.../
