The floor begins to shake and people run for earplugs when Snowy Hydro’s Tumut 3 starts another generator. Thousands of cubic gallons of water pour though an enormous tunnel under the Snowy Mountains from a nearby mountain top. It only takes a few seconds to run up this miracle. However, it took 100,000 workers a quarter century to achieve it in Kosciuszko National Park, New South Wales, Australia.
The Snowy Mountains Project Impresses from All Angles
The total installed capacity from the ten separate power stations is 3.772 gigawatts. The main phase took 25 years to complete between 1949 and 1972. Tragically, the project cost the lives of 121 people. However, they and their colleagues left a mighty monument behind.
They built 1,000 miles of roads, 7 townships, and over a hundred construction camps to house the workers. Two thirds of them were immigrants who qualified to settle in their new homeland. Between them, they produced 16 major dams, and seven hydropower stations in the Snowy Mountains. Then they added 2 pumping stations, 90 miles of tunnels and 50 miles of pipelines and aqueducts to carry water.
Snowy Hydro Announces a New Expansion Plan in the Mountains
Paul Broad, Snowy Hydro’s chief executive wants to change the utility’s role from peaking station to storage. “You can’t have renewables without reliable storage and the best form of storage is water, he explains. “We are betting the whole company on it,” he adds because it’s the ideal companion to wind and solar.
Australia is one of the first countries heading towards a mainly solar and wind-based renewable energy system.” So says Andrew Blakers, professor of engineering at Australian National University. “Snowy Hydro is important. That’s because if we don’t put in more energy storage then we will run into serious trouble by mid-2020.”
There’s a project rolling out in the Snowy Mountains to add new power stations and tunnels to the network. These will add an additional two-gigawatts to double capacity. This should be sufficient to level differences between supply and demand in New South Wales without building additional dams.
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Preview Image: Snowy Mountains NSW Talbingo Dam
