Slow progress at Snowy 2.0, with more “challenging” conditions ahead and a Florence clone

Federal government owned utility Snowy Hydro says it is slowly regaining ground on the beleaguered Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project, after a horror year that brought tunneling progress to a stand-still and saw costs blow out to $12 billion.

In an appearance before the Senate Estimates committee on Monday, Snowy Hydro chief Dennis Barnes said tunnel boring machine Florence had made 241 metres of new progress since December, when it was “un-paused” after months of being bogged in soft soil.

But Barnes says Florence – which needs to move an average of about 15 metres a day over the next few years to get the job done – is likely to face further challenging conditions in the years of work ahead, with another 15km of boring needed to complete the headrace tunnel.

“We’re mindful that some of the ground conditions ahead of Florence will be challenging, and we are continuing to closely examine options to de-risk this work,” Barnes told the Senate estimates hearing.

“We know towards the end of the tunnel, there’s in the order of 500 metres to 900 metres of fault zones. We know that will prove challenging.”

Barnes said the project team was considering a range of options to keep the project up to speed, including investing in another tunnel boring machine.

“Over the next one to two months we’ll continue the analysis on that and make a decision,” he said, adding that it shouldn’t require any more money.

Barnes, who took over the reins at Snowy Hydro at the start of 2023, has now appeared three times before the Senate Estimates committee and overseen a Snowy 2.0 project review and reset that has adjusted the mega project’s delivery deadline to December 2028, and its budget to $12 billion.

Originally, a smaller version of Snowy 2.0 was projected to cost about $2 billion and be completed in 2021.

Among the key criticisms of the past management of Snowy 2.0 has been the lack of public disclosure on project delays and blowouts – and the lack of detailed explanation of why these delays and cost blow-outs have occurred.

At the last Senate Estimates hearing in late October, Barnes told the Committee that the most of Snowy 2.0’s troubles had come from a combination of fallout from Covid, design immaturity and adverse geotechnical findings.

This is difficult to verify independently, however, with huge chunks of public versions of the 110-page Snowy 2.0 reset either fully or partially redacted.

This week, Barnes also promised to promised to fix the large sinkhole that developed on Florence’s path in the Kosciuszko National Park.

He said Snowy Hydro had recently entered into an enforceable undertaking with the NSW government, including a $300,000 payment to NSW National Parks.

“The hole will be filled in, revegetated. You’ll never know it’s there,” he said.

With AAP