Snowy 2.0 is a pumped-hydro project that will pump water through 27 kilometres of tunnels between two dams. TBM Florence is one of three huge machines that will build those tunnels…
Snowy Hydro did not confirm how far the hole is from the tunnel entrance, but satellite data suggests it is roughly 150 metres from the entrance…
“The concerning thing is that if they’ve only got 200 metres in 10 months, that’s an average rate of only 60 centimetres a day. Now, these machines were designed to travel 30 metres a day, and in good conditions, 50 metres a day.”
High in NSW’s rugged Snowy Mountains, one of the world’s most ambitious engineering projects is battling an onslaught of cost pressures, supply chain delays and transmission challenges…
Snowy chief commercial officer Gordon Wymer points to an old estimate from ITK Services that some 8000 GWh – 23 times the capacity of Snowy 2.0 – could be needed for a fully renewable NEM, while Snowy’s own estimates signal that three to five times the capacity of 2.0 is needed for a 50-60 per cent renewable grid…
“The cost/benefit analyses undertaken by TransGrid and also by AEMO makes quite clear that HumeLink [the necessary transmission lines] plus Snowy 2.0 – they go together, the one is useless without the other – will destroy the wealth of New South Wales electricity consumers and Australian taxpayers,” says Bruce Mountain, director of longstanding Snowy 2.0 critic, Victoria Energy Policy Centre at Victoria University…
Broad fears the $3.3 billion HumeLink will slide into 2027, while the $3 billion VNI West, which three years ago was expected by 2028, is now pencilled in for July 2031 in AEMO’s latest draft grid blueprint but may slip into 2032.
From the OP link: “The concerning thing is that if they’ve only got 200 metres in 10 months, that’s an average rate of only 60 centimetres a day.
Sounds like the problems with the Bertha boring machine underneath Seattle several years ago. That one was for a traffic tunnel.
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If they ever decide to build California’s high speed rail tracks all the way to San Francisco, they will need to tunnel through the Diablo range, south of the Bay area.
In addition to that very mixed geology (Franciscan melange) will come 13 more miles of tunnels through the Tehachapi mountains on the line from Bakersfield to the high desert. Then come the tunnels through the San Gabriel mountains…
The monumental task of building California’s bullet train will require punching 36 miles of tunnels through the geologically complex mountains north of Los Angeles.
Crews will have to cross the tectonic boundary that separates the North American and Pacific plates, boring through a jumble of fractured rock formations and a maze of earthquake faults, some of which are not mapped…
However, a Times analysis of project documents, as well as interviews with scientists, engineers, and construction experts, indicates that the deadline and budget targets will almost certainly be missed—and that the state has underestimated the challenges ahead, particularly completing the tunneling on time.
“It doesn’t strike me as realistic,” said James Monsees, one of the world’s top tunneling experts and an author of the federal manual on highway tunneling. “Faults are notorious for causing trouble.”
It doesn’t help that the voters were sold a bill of goods back in 2008. The project was to be finished in 2020, cost $20 billion (current estimates are over $100B) with a travel time between LA and SF to be 2.7 hours.
I had missed this in the original story:
“The machine weighs 2,400 tonnes and measures 143 metres in length. As it bores the tunnel, concrete reinforcements are inserted behind it, meaning the TBM can not be pulled out the way it went into the tunnel.”
A further two-year delay in the troubled Snowy 2.0 project in NSW has triggered warnings about potential blackouts and higher prices as coal power plants retire, and stoked fresh worries that Australia’s energy transition will take longer and cost more than anticipated.
Federal government-owned Snowy Hydro advised on Wednesday that the 2000-megawatt pumped hydro storage project in NSW may not be fully online until the end of 2029.
The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project has doubled within the past six months to be close to $12 billion, according to a new cost estimate, forcing the Albanese government to make a critical and costly decision about the project’s future.
The massive 2000 megawatt expansion of the Snowy pumped hydro scheme was announced by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in March 2017 with a completion date of 2021 and a price tag of $2 billion. By May this year that had blown out to $5.9 billion and a 2029 deadline…
The Victorian and NSW governments are nervous about energy security and the risks of blackouts as the grid is weaned off fossil fuels, with coal plants closing at a rapid rate as cheaper renewables come on the market.
Victoria has committed taxpayers’ dollars to cover the potential costs of keeping two of its largest coal plants operating until their expected closure dates, and NSW is considering subsidising Eraring, its biggest coal power plant.
The planning application and series of supporting documents from Snowy Hydro, published this week on the NSW government portal, seek permission for “remediation of sinkhole and ground consolidation works to facilitate the progression of TBM Florence.”
Snowy needs to do this because the nine-metre deep sinkhole caused by tunnelling in unexpectedly soft ground is outside of the project’s construction zone. The voluminous planning documents, including a 383-page geotechnical report, will be open to public submissions for just two weeks…
Bowen is yet to publicly release the full report detailing the cost blowout, including the $4.3 billion already spent, but said last week that “design immaturity” at the time of final investment decision and site conditions and geology that “should have been known” were key contributing factors…
“The original geological predictions anticipated in the geotechnical baseline report for the Tantangara Headrace Adit Tunnel, indicated a different geological condition than those encountered by the TBM where the sinkhole was formed,” the voluminous geotechnical report says. Additional faults and poor ground conditions cannot be ruled out in future TBM excavation activities along the tunnel alignments."
I see that battery backup has been gaining a lot of traction in Australia. And both reliability and costs appear to be well understood.
There has been at least one fire, but I don’t know how common this has been and don’t know if the problem has been concentrated with respect to suppliers. I do know that Tesla has been getting a lot of orders there for their Megapacks and I’m aware that non-Li ion solutions are coming to market.
Rob
He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.