{"id":639924,"date":"2026-04-30T05:39:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T05:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/639924\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T05:39:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T05:39:09","slug":"snowy-hydro-2-0-is-a-sunk-cost-fallacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/639924\/","title":{"rendered":"Snowy Hydro 2.0 is a sunk cost fallacy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I <a href=\"https:\/\/www.macrobusiness.com.au\/2026\/04\/snowy-hydro-2-0-transforms-into-42-billion-sinkhole\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">reported<\/a> this week that the cost of the Snowy Hydro 2.0 project is estimated to have ballooned from an initial announced cost of $2 billion in 2017 to around $42 billion.<\/p>\n<p>This cost estimate by Professor Bruce Mountain and former energy executive Ted Woodley includes direct construction costs of $20 billion, transmission infrastructure costs totalling $12 billion and interest charges of $8 billion over 15 years:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Snowy-Hydro-2.0-Cost.png\" width=\"660\" height=\"348\" alt=\"Snowy Hydro cost blowout\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Mountain and Woodley said Snowy 2.0 had always been a \u201cdreadful idea\u201d and labelled it \u201cone of the biggest disasters\u201d in Australian infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p>Advertisement<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I reported this week that the cost of the Snowy Hydro 2.0 project is estimated to have ballooned&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":639925,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[64,63,99,164],"class_list":["post-639924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639924\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/639925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}