On a chilly morning near the old township of Adaminaby on 17 October, 1949, a small gathering of dignitaries stood in gusting wind, and launched Australia onto one of its greatest adventures-the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme.
Surrounded by fluttering Union Jacks and a brass band bussed in for the national anthem, 'God Save the King', the Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, his Minister for Works, Nelson Lemmon, and the Snowy authority's first commissioner, William Hudson, pitched Australia into a revolution.
The country was agricultural and stoically British. The Snowy Scheme drove it to the forefront of construction and engineering technology and created one of the world's great pancultures; a nation reshaped and enriched by the influences of almost every nationality on the planet.
By the time the Scheme was completed in 1974, the major contractors had changed from British, American and Norwegian, to Australian; the equipment was mostly Japanese, Australian expertise was now being sought elsewhere in the world, and Australians were cooking with garlic and eating spaghetti, salami, rice and other previously 'foreign' foods. The revolution was complete—for the moment.
The Snowy Scheme harnessed alpine water, redirected it westwards to turn an inland dustbowl into a foodbowl, and in the course of the water's fall down the western slopes of the Australian Alps generated hydro-electricity for Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. Half a century later, that foodbowl produces a third of Australia's agricultural output, and Snowy hydro-electricity has become vital to the economics and environmental sustainability of electricity generation in eastern Australia.
In its first 30 years the Snowy Scheme operated smoothly, slipping from public consciousness. However, by the 1980s, as the community started becoming aware of irrigation-induced salinity, and the deteriorating condition of Australia's rivers the Snowy Scheme became the environmental movement’s whipping boy.
Then, during the climate of economic rationalism in the 1980s, the state government shareholders and their utilities strove to get their electricity at the cheapest possible cost—irrespective of any long-term infrastructure neglect.
In 1993 the Prime Minister, Paul Keating, pushed for the Scheme to be corporatised and taken from direct government management. It sounded straight forward but brought into the open the competing vested interests that continue to be a blight on energy and environmental management to the present day: Renewable energy from hydro-electricity versus the need to restore flows into over-exploited river systems ... versus the real political power, the big irrigation industries, namely rice and cotton.
A bitter debate brought into sharp relief the whole issue of limited water resources on the world’s driest continent, with the Snowy Scheme caught in the middle; a great water bank that all the competing interests wanted to use for their own particular needs—in addition to the Scheme’s prime function to generate clean, renewable energy. (The Snowy Scheme offsets more than five million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year).
By 1998 a compromise of sorts was reached which acknowledged the water released into river and irrigation systems had been badly managed. A range of measures were introduced to correct this to allow a more equitable use and distribution of this precious resource.
The water issue resolved (for the moment) The Federal Government returned to its corporatisation plans which led to the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Authority becoming Snowy Hydro operating as a corporation, not a bureaucracy. The new structure was established with new systems, advanced new technologies, a new workplace culture and, most significantly, a new role. It changed from a base-load generator to a means of stabilising prices in a new, deregulated energy market. It went from only having to worry about releasing a certain amount of water and generating a certain amount of electricity, to a modern high-technology operation dealing in complex, derivative energy and water products—such as insurance contracts to cover other generators' outages, or to generate extra electricity on-call to prevent price jumps in the new, deregulated and real-time electricity market.
For example, if sudden increases in demand start pushing up the spot price, energy retailers can call on their Snowy contracts to have extra electricity generated (almost instantly) into the grid to offset demand pressures.
So, during the last decade of the 20th century and the start of the 21st the Snowy Scheme in many ways re-lived its birth-pains of the early 1950s. The debates, issues, frustrations and despair during the water fight through the 1990s, and finally resolution and a new role in stabilising the energy market, was in many ways a 'right of passage' for Australia as it entered the new millennium.
The old Snowy was a triumph of physical and engineering prowess; the new Snowy might become a monument to a nation finally able to face-up to some of the most complex and confronting economic and environmental issues facing any country.