When former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull first unveiled plans for Australia’s biggest and most ambitious new renewable energy project at a remote press conference in the NSW Snowy Mountains in March 2017, things were moving fast.
The project, dubbed Snowy 2.0, had been put to him by the hydroelectricity provider just two weeks earlier, at a meeting with then-Snowy boss Paul Broad. When complete, it would produce enough back-up power to supply the grid for a full week – equivalent to putting in 26 million home batteries. If all went to plan, it would be finished within four years, at a cost of about $2 billion.
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