Providing renewable power to help Australia meet its global climate change commitments.
Operational for the last five decades, Snowy Hydro is helping Australia meet its global commitments on climate change and will generate more power and lower electricity prices.
Key information
- Location:
- New South Wales, Australia
- Date started:
- 2017
- Completion date:
- Ongoing
- Client type:
- Infrastructure
- Main services:
- Project controls, cost estimating, scheduling, risk management, commercial management
Renewable power
The Snowy Mountains Hydro scheme has been operational in New South Wales for the last five decades. The construction of the scheme is considered one of the world’s largest engineering achievements and opened up the area with improvements to roads and consists of nine power stations, 16 major dams, 80 kilometres of aqueducts and 145 kilometres of interconnected tunnels.
Snowy 2.0 is the next chapter in the scheme’s history and is located in the northern reaches of the 6,900 square kilometre Kosciusko National Park. This important renewable energy project will provide on-demand energy and large-scale storage for many generations to come. It is anticipated to increase the scheme’s generation capacity by up to 2,000 MegaWatts and involves the linking of two existing dams.
The project forms part of a national agenda to not only create sources of renewable power generation but also to contribute towards a national approach for the delivery of new transmission projects to provide a sustainable, reliable and affordable network across Australia.
Early project involvement
We have been involved from the early stages of the project, appointed by Snowy Hydro Limited to work on the feasibility study to provide cost estimation, scheduling and risk management to set the baseline.
Once the final investment decision was granted in December 2018, we worked with the tenderers to provided updates to the cost and schedule.
We have also provided procurement and contract support for the exploratory works and enabling works civil packages as well as project control services across cost and schedule management and document control for the owner’s team.
Environmental challenge
As a complex project within a national park, an environmental impact statement was required to comply with Australia’s national environmental law, developed to protect the natural world from any negative impacts of developments.
During the development of the environmental impact statement over a two-year period, Snowy Hydro worked with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service to ensure that the long-term management objectives for the Kosciusko National Park were considered during the Snowy 2.0 project, acknowledging the need to minimise the impact on the values and biodiversity of the park.
This culminated in the receipt of the EPBC approval from the Federal Government on 30 June 2020; a significant milestone for the project and the final green light for commencement of the construction of the main works.
