The Snowy Hydro expansion plan ticks a lot of boxes politically for Malcolm Turnbull.
![Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at the Snowy Hydro scheme on Thursday.](/web/20170426140216im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/z/l/a/b/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guz4xs.png/1489823151465.jpg)
Australians have a deep affection for the project. It is ingenious. It is renewable energy without too much ideological baggage. Unlike onshore gas extraction, it may not irk too many farmers. It might even turn out to be tolerable for environmentalists.
What's more, our multicultural heritage is deeply embedded in the rocks under the Snowy Mountains, too. Of 100,000 workers who toiled on the project for 25 years from 1949, many were immigrants constructing a better life through a nation-building project of which they could be proud.
Now the Prime Minister claims: "We won't shrink away from their courage."
Besides that sentimentality, Australians do feel a strong sense of ownership of the scheme. When the then prime minister John Howard added the Commonwealth's 13 per cent of the scheme to plans by NSW (58 per cent) and Victoria (29 per cent) to privatise their shares in 2006, a revolt ensued. It came from a disparate group of high-profile Australians, media outlets and even shock jocks such as Alan Jones. Mr Howard backed off and the states followed suit.
The expansion plan unveiled by Mr Turnbull would, if it passed feasibility, funding and environmental tests, include three new pipelines and power stations to kick in when needed to add 50 per cent to the scheme's power output. It would use the so-called "pumped hydro" method to pump water up hill to be stored until released to generate hydro-electricity then recycled for use again.
Critics are right to ask why this idea hasn't been adopted during its 30-year gestation. Technology and power prices are part of the answer. But what will NSW have to pay for the expansion? And will the $2 billion total cost blow out? The four to seven-year completion target is a concern, too.
Still, expanding the Snowy scheme is, in some ways, a populist response to the perceived energy crisis.
Herald letter writers are good judges. Many are aghast at the gas situation, in large part characterised as follows: Australian leaders let multinationals buy – and strike deals with – our companies, explore for our gas, upset our farmers and greenies, then when the gas flowed they made squillions by selling it to foreigners. That leaves Australians paying top dollar for our gas-fired electricity with too much of it going offshore as opposed to here when we need it.
That gas issue has clashed with South Australia's blackouts over the past eight months. The federal government blamed renewables when other factors such as power pole collapses were more in play. Nonetheless, South Australia needed to deliver power certainty.
This week Premier Jay Weatherill unveiled a $550 million plan for a new gas-fuelled power plant and incentives for gas exploration – even though many analysts believe that gas cannot be the stopgap power source between coal and renewables. The SA plan included a big battery storage, too. Crucially, it skirted national electricity market rules by empowering a state minister to order that state producers send gas into the local market, not the national grid, at times of shortage.
Part of Mr Turnbull's alternative plan was to secure, without mandated quotas, a guarantee from big gas producers that they would supply the domestic market in peak periods to help avoid blackouts.
But the Snowy plan is the key. Notably, Mr Turnbull's public statement said "Snowy Hydro already provides back-up energy to NSW and Victoria and could extend to South Australia when expanded".
The tension between Mr Weatherill and Canberra is palpable, shown by his stoush with federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg on Thursday.
Mr Turnbull even called himself "a nation-building prime minister". Believe it or not, that moniker sounds better than "a wishy-washy leader at the mercy of climate denialists" – the ones who refuse to countenance even the baseline and credit scheme which Mr Turnbull had included in Direct Action only to jettison it when the right-wingers revolted.
The Snowy move may be a grand political gesture but it does not fix the energy issue. Agreement is required between states and Canberra to rewrite the national power grid rules. And a market mechanism is required to ensure a smoother transition to the most efficient power-generating technologies to reduce emissions.