An energy expert casts doubt on the commercial viability of the multibillion-dollar Snowy 2.0 project.
Alan Lawrenson says the project will not generate a single megawatt of energy.
“I don’t think it will perform well commercially and in fact there is a chance it may never be completed,” he told Daily Mail Australia.
“I’d love to be proven wrong, but that’s my consensus right now.”
Lawrenson is an energy author who previously worked in scientific fields and is an investor in the mining, oil and gas industries.
He said he was recently at a mining conference and that the general consensus among energy experts is that the Snowy 2.0 project is potentially doomed to fail.
“They have a lot of doubt about the outcome and there certainly won’t be a commercial return, a positive commercial return, from the project, if it is completed.”
The controversial Snowy Hydro 2.0, which aims to excavate a 15km route beneath Kosciuszko National Park, was launched in March 2022.
The controversial project, which aims to excavate a 15-kilometre route beneath Kosciuszko National Park, was announced by then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2017 and construction began in 2019.
It stalled last year when a $150 million, 400-ton drilling rig called Florence got stuck.
‘It took him a few months to free himself and so on. At this point it’s been about a year, we’ve already covered 800 meters and we still have 16 kilometers to go,” Mr Lawrenson said.
Lawrenson said he believes the cost of Snowy 2.0 will increase even more.
‘When you spend $13 billion of taxpayer money, when it’s all done, I think it will be more than $13 billion because these projects have a way of sucking up money.
Alan Lawrenson believes that the Snowy 2.0 project will not generate a single megawatt of energy
“I have spoken to geologists and they have told me that the drilling machine is going through some of the hardest rock in Australia and the progress it will make will be very slow and of course lack of progress means additional cost.”
Lawrenson compared the original Snowy Mountains plan that opened in 1972 to Snowy 2.0.
“The Snowy One project is one of the world’s great engineering feats, and one can only praise that particular project and how it has been added to, complemented and maintained.”
He said that compared to Snowy 2.0, the original scheme is outstanding because it was designed by engineers, “without much ideological leaning in the decision-making process.”
Lawrenson believes a major problem with Snowy 2.0 is that it was “an ideological move in the first place, rather than a strict business decision to invest in major infrastructure.”
The Florence machine “has been running for about a year at this stage, and has already covered 800 meters and has 16 kilometers left to go,” Lawrenson said.
“The Snowy One project is one of the world’s great engineering feats,” said Mr Lawrenson.
On alternatives to the troubled Snowy 2.0 project, Mr Lawrenson said: “There are two possible ways out of the quagmire we find ourselves in now.” One is to build two HELE (high efficiency, low emissions) coal-fired power stations, one in Queensland and one in Victoria or on the New South Wales border.’
He said the cost would be about A$4 billion per gigawatt of production, saying that would “take the pressure off everywhere.”
“The cost of the energy generated is very low, and the pollution, the amount of CO2, in the general sense that goes out into the atmosphere, is nothing more than perhaps equivalent energy sources.”
Lawrenson said another alternative is nuclear power.
“Make an early commitment to small modular reactors and you’ll put them in place of coal-fired power plants that are closed, because you already have the distribution infrastructure in place.”