Post #3364945

The reason we all knew it was doomed, by the way, was because we could extrapolate the cost per MWh of battery storage across the expected construction lifetime of the project, and note that by the time it was turned on it would be approximately the most expensive way to store electricity in the developed world. In recent times the government has stimulated the installation of many times Snowy2.0’a capacity in the form of lithium batteries distributed all over the country, at an almost undetectably small fraction of Snowy2.0’s cost, delivered in 12 months. We were always going to be able to make that comparison. Turnbull wanted a massive infrastructure project that’d have his name on it, that’d take long enough to build that it’d eke out another decade of life for coal. This was the era when the AGL CEO was telling the government they were shutting down Liddell whether they liked it or not, and Turnbull was telling the world what kind of mathematics were permitted in Australia. It was a uniquely stupid time, and Snowy2.0 is like the decaying peal of the bell you can still hear many minutes after the hammer has struck.