May 2026

Australia has a serious problem with major infrastructure projects.

We don’t build them properly. We don’t cost them honestly. And when the numbers explode, no one is held accountable.

Snowy Hydro 2.0 is the latest spectacular example.

This was sold to Australians as a visionary nation-building project – a clean energy “mega battery” that would help power the country through the renewable transition.

When Malcolm Turnbull announced it, the promise was grand, the language was heroic and the price tag sounded manageable.

Now the numbers are grotesque.

The main project alone has blown out massively. When related transmission lines, financing costs and associated infrastructure are included, experts Bruce Mountain and Ted Woodley estimate the true cost could be $42 billion – around 20 times the original political sales pitch.

That is not a cost overrun. That is a public policy catastrophe.

And yet, as with so many government-backed infrastructure adventures, the real damage is hidden behind accounting tricks, vague budget papers and the comforting fiction that this is still an “asset” worth billions.

The Commonwealth continues to carry Snowy Hydro at an $8.3 billion book value, despite reports that the project’s cost could reach $20 billion for the pumping infrastructure alone, with the broader cost far higher once transmission and finance are counted.

Try that in the private sector. A board that allowed a project to blow out by this scale, while pretending the original value still made sense, would be under brutal scrutiny.

But governments operate by different rules.

They can move costs off-budget. They can classify risky spending as investment. They can bury the real bill in future years, related entities and regulated charges passed on to households.

And taxpayers are left holding the bag.

Snowy 2.0 is not alone. It sits in the same ugly club as Inland Rail, the NBN, Western Sydney Airport and countless state-level transport projects that began with glossy brochures and ended with budget carnage.

The pattern is always the same.

Politicians announce the dream. Consultants validate the dream. Contractors price the dream. Then reality arrives – geology, labour shortages, technical risk, environmental complexity, poor planning and political cowardice.

By then, the project is “too big to fail”.

So the taxpayer keeps paying.

Snowy 2.0 also exposes another uncomfortable truth: the energy transition is being sold as inevitable, cheap and clean, but many of the enabling projects are anything but cheap. If the numbers were presented honestly at the start, many would never survive public scrutiny.

The issue is not whether Australia needs energy storage. It does.

The issue is whether governments can be trusted to deliver complex infrastructure without turning it into a feeding trough for contractors, consultants, unions and protected monopolies.

Snowy Hydro 2.0 was meant to be a monument to Australian ambition.

Instead, it is becoming a monument to political vanity, secrecy and fiscal irresponsibility.

And once again, the bill will land where it always lands: with taxpayers and consumers.