Snowy Hydro boss doubles down on project timeline despite slow progress and budget blow-out

The transformer hall will form part of the power station about 800m beneath Kosciuszko National Park. (ABC South East NSW: Floss Adams)

Snowy Hydro bosses say they will meet their 2028 deadline despite billion-dollar budget blowouts and geological headaches.

It has been a challenging time for the company. Just last week a partial tunnel collapse at the Snowy 2.0 construction site made headlines after a blast broke through to an adjacent tunnel in the main transformer cavern.

Snowy Hydro chief executive Dennis Barnes this week downplayed the significance of the partial collapse.

“It was an incident that would have been fully expected one blast later,” he said.

“The site is entirely safe, and people are evacuated before any of those blasts are undertaken.”

But it was not planned for, and the company was investigating the conditions that saw it break open the tunnel sooner than expected.

Snowy 2.0 is a pumped-hydro project that will pump water through 27 kilometres of tunnels between two dams in the heart of Kosciuszko National Park in New South Wales.

Challenges with Florence the machine

Rumours that a tunnel-boring machine named Florence was stuck again — after it previously became bogged in soft ground for the better part of a year — were quickly dismissed, with the company saying it remained “fully operational”.

Florence has now completed 850 metres of a 16-kilometre headrace tunnel since it was commissioned in March 2022, but has now transitioned through soft to hard rock.

The ABC reported in March that Florence had progressed by 230 metres.

In April, it managed just 64 metres for the month after it encountered hard rock.

“Florence has been operating as we expected since her restart in December. We went through the soft ground, reached some very hard ground,”  Mr Barnes said.

“We were averaging about seven or eight metres a day, which is what we expected as we got going again.

“And I think the last few days, we’ve had 12 metres a day, so Florence is absolutely on the move.”

Asked if the challenging rock conditions would affect the 2028 timeline for the project, Mr Barnes was hopeful.

“All of the signals are there that we’re going to achieve that date,” he said.

“But it’s a big project. There’s still a lot of geology to get through … achieving December 2028 is our operational date.”

Snowy 2.0 senior project manager Guy Boardman has worked for Snowy Hydro for 15 years and expects Florence to pick up the pace.

“It will get a lot easier and pick up when we get out of this curve,” he said.

“They don’t have very good turning circles, these tunnel boring machines.”

A lightning rod for criticism

The project has long attracted widespread criticism from environmental groups, energy analysts and others, but Mr Barnes said it was expected.

“I think, you know, we’re a government-owned entity. We’re operating in a national park of international significance. We should be open to a lot of scrutiny,” he said.

“I don’t actually feel too bad about it.”

Snowy Hydro is weighing up how it will speed up the tunnelling for the main headrace and has not ruled out commissioning a fourth machine to assist Florence.

“We’ve still not made the decision as to whether we’re going to put a fourth tunnel boring machine in, or repurpose one of the existing ones, or use conventional excavation methods,” Mr Barnes said.

“But what I can tell you is we are going to do something. There is no, ‘Do nothing’, scenario.

“It’s more and more likely that it will be a combination of repurposing existing machines and conventional methods.”

Transparency and accountability

Questions remain about whether Snowy Hydro has been transparent and straightforward about the true scale of its challenges after the project grew from an initial cost of $2 billion to an estimated $12 billion.

The company had initially described Florence as “paused” rather than “stuck” last year, and just last week said it was “fully operational” while in reality it was battling through hard rock at well below its capacity.

Mr Barnes acknowledged he got it wrong when he said it would take “weeks, not months” to get Florence back up and running, which then took more than a year.

He described that comment as “probably the most regretful phrase in my first year in Snowy Hydro”.

“I got that wrong, that’s quite obvious,” Mr Barnes said.