In the Pioneer Valley, about seventy kilometres west of Mackay, a handful of grazing families spent 2023 and 2024 in a strange kind of limbo. Queensland Hydro, the government-owned corporation building the Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro scheme, had approached them about land needed for a dam, tunnels and a transmission corridor big enough to serve a 5-gigawatt power station. Some sold. Some signed access deals while survey crews and drill rigs worked their paddocks. Then, in November 2024, the project that had brought Queensland Hydro to their gate stopped existing. By the following year's state Budget, the corporation's remaining task on that land was not construction — it was closing the project down, including selling some of the acquired properties back to the families who had agreed to give them up (Queensland Budget 2025–26, Budget Paper No. 2, Jun-2025). The paddocks are still there. The dam that justified buying them is not.
What the government did
A pumped hydro scheme works like a giant, reusable battery. Pumps push water uphill into a reservoir when electricity is cheap and plentiful — typically the middle of the day, when solar output is highest — then release it back downhill through turbines to generate power when the grid needs it, such as after sunset. In September 2022, the then Palaszczuk Labor government released the Queensland Energy and Jobs Plan, a $62 billion, decade-long blueprint for shifting the state's coal-heavy grid toward renewables, with pumped hydro at its centre (approx.; Queensland Government, Energy and Jobs Plan launch materials, Sep-2022). Two projects anchored the plan. Borumba, near Gympie, was costed at around $14.2 billion for 2 gigawatts of capacity. Pioneer-Burdekin, west of Mackay, was far bigger: a proposed 5-gigawatt, 120-gigawatt-hour scheme costed at around $12 billion, publicly described as able to underpin roughly half of the state's peak demand and expected to support more than 3,000 jobs at the peak of construction (Queensland Hydro, Pioneer-Burdekin Pumped Hydro Project Fact Sheet, Oct-2022). In April 2024, Labor legislated the ambition behind the plan, writing renewable energy targets of 50 per cent by 2030, 70 per cent by 2032 and 80 per cent by 2035 into the Energy (Renewable Transformation and Jobs) Act 2024.
The Crisafulli-led LNP won the October 2024 state election, ending just over nine years of Labor government. The incoming government says an early briefing showed Pioneer-Burdekin's cost estimate had nearly tripled, to around $36.8 billion — equivalent, on Queensland Treasury's population projections, to roughly $15,653 for every household in the state (approx.; Queensland Government, Ministerial Media Statement, 5-Nov-2024). On 5 November 2024, at a press conference in Mackay, Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie and Treasurer David Janetzki formally stopped the project, citing the cost blowout, unresolved environmental approvals and what they described as inadequate community consultation. Land acquisition and early site works were wound back; selling some acquired properties back to their original owners was still being processed through the 2025-26 financial year (Queensland Budget 2025–26, Budget Paper No. 2, Jun-2025).
The rest of the reset followed over the next fourteen months. In April 2025, oversight of Queensland Hydro passed to the Queensland Investment Corporation (QIC), which was told to assess Borumba alongside three smaller, cheaper pumped hydro options: Mount Rawdon, a converted gold mine near Bundaberg; Big T, near Toowoomba; and Capricornia, near Mackay. On 10 October 2025, the government released its Queensland Energy Roadmap 2025, replacing Labor's plan with one built around gas peaking capacity, extended coal generation and a smaller pumped hydro pipeline, and formally confirming Pioneer-Burdekin would not proceed (Queensland Energy Roadmap 2025, Queensland Treasury, Oct-2025). Two months later, on 10 December 2025, Parliament repealed the legislated 2030, 2032 and 2035 renewable targets, while the government said it remained committed to net zero emissions by 2050 without a legislated interim milestone (Queensland Parliament, Energy Roadmap Amendment Bill 2025, passed 10-Dec-2025).
The strongest case
A $36.8 billion mega-project that hadn't secured its land, its approvals or its public
Put the cancellation case at its strongest, because parts of it hold up under scrutiny. Pioneer-Burdekin was still in early works — land acquisition and site investigation, not a poured foundation — when the government changed. A cost estimate moving from $12 billion to something like $36.8 billion inside two years, before a shovel had done meaningful work, is not a rounding error; it is the kind of blowout that has sunk other Australian energy megaprojects, including the federally owned Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme, whose own cost and completion date blew out well beyond initial estimates after construction was already under way (approx.; public reporting on Snowy Hydro cost and schedule revisions). A government handed a briefing showing a project heading toward $37 billion, with formal environmental approvals still outstanding and Pioneer Valley landholders saying they were never properly consulted, has a genuine argument for stopping before the sunk cost grows larger rather than after.
There is a timing argument too. Pioneer-Burdekin was not due to deliver its full 120-gigawatt-hours of storage until well into the 2030s, which meant it could never have closed the reliability gap Queensland faces this decade, regardless of who held office. Redirecting money toward smaller, faster, better-costed storage and firming projects is, on its face, a more disciplined way to spend a limited energy budget than continuing to fund one enormous scheme whose price kept climbing.
The evidence
None of the numbers in this dispute are seriously contested; the disagreement is about what they mean. The Queensland Audit Office's Energy 2025 report, tabled 11 December 2025, confirms that around $599 million in government shareholder equity had already gone into Queensland Hydro's pumped hydro work by the time oversight moved to QIC (approx.; Queensland Audit Office, Energy 2025, Report 7: 2025–26, 11-Dec-2025). Whatever Queensland ultimately builds, that money — plus the years spent on Pioneer-Burdekin's planning, land negotiations and early works — has so far produced no dispatchable capacity for the grid at all.
AEMO's 2025 Electricity Statement of Opportunities, published in August 2025 and updated that October, forecasts an approximate 80-megawatt reliability gap for Queensland this coming summer — the risk of demand outstripping available supply in short, sharp windows — driven by lower generator availability, rising peak demand forecasts and slower-than-planned commissioning of new dispatchable projects, with the risk easing in 2026-27 as new capacity comes online (AEMO, 2025 Electricity Statement of Opportunities, Aug-2025, and October 2025 Update). AEMO's modelling repeatedly stresses that firming capacity — generation or storage that can switch on the moment wind and solar output drops — is now the binding constraint on a fast-decarbonising grid, more than the volume of renewable generation itself.
The pattern that killed Pioneer-Burdekin did not end with its cancellation. CSIRO's final GenCost 2025–26 report, published 15 July 2026, put Borumba's revised $18.4 billion price tag — up from its own 2022 estimate of $14.2 billion, a rise of roughly 30 per cent — at about $9,200 per kilowatt of capacity, around 62 per cent above CSIRO's benchmark cost of $5,687 per kilowatt for a comparable 24-hour pumped hydro system, even as the cost of grid-scale batteries kept falling, down 11 to 16 per cent through 2025 depending on how long they can discharge for (CSIRO, GenCost 2025–26, 15-Jul-2026). The pumped hydro project that survived the reset is now priced well outside the range Australia's own independent, federally funded science agency regards as reasonable for the technology.
The gap in the firming plan
The cancellation case does not answer a separate question: what fills the hole Pioneer-Burdekin leaves in Queensland's plan to firm a grid running on more wind and solar. This concern deserves the same fair hearing as the cancellation itself, because it does not come only from renewable energy advocates. Cornwall Insight, an independent energy market analytics firm, modelled the effect of losing 120 gigawatt-hours of long-duration storage and found wholesale price forecasts for Queensland in 2035 rising by more than 60 per cent, staying at least 40 per cent higher through to 2040, in the absence of an equivalent replacement (approx.; Cornwall Insight Australia, wholesale price forecast analysis, 30-Jan-2025).
The government's own replacement pipeline has narrowed rather than grown. Of the four smaller pumped hydro options QIC assessed, the government shelved Mount Rawdon in 2026: at around $6 billion for 2 gigawatts, it was the cheapest of the four by a wide margin, working out at roughly $3 million per megawatt against Borumba's roughly $9.2 million per megawatt. Instead, reporting on QIC's outcome indicates the government committed around $324 million in early-works funding to Borumba (approx.; reporting on the QIC pumped hydro assessment outcome, 2026). Big T and Capricornia remain unbuilt and, in public documents, largely uncosted. The October 2025 Energy Roadmap fills most of the resulting gap with gas: its own modelling points to gas-fired generation capacity rising to around 4.1 gigawatts by 2030 and to between 6.1 and 8.3 gigawatts by 2035, alongside extending the state's coal-fired power stations beyond 2035 (Queensland Energy Roadmap 2025, Oct-2025). Industry analysis by RenewEconomy suggests large-scale renewable and storage investment in Queensland fell by more than 74 per cent in the Crisafulli government's first year in office — a figure from industry reporting rather than an official audited count, and worth reading as indicative rather than precise (approx.; RenewEconomy analysis, 2025).
Queensland has not closed the gap Pioneer-Burdekin left behind. It has filled part of it with gas, and left the rest for later.
The critique
Both arguments above can be true at once, and holding them together is the point of this masthead's fairness rule. Cancelling a project heading toward $36.8 billion, with its approvals incomplete and its host communities aggrieved, was a defensible act of fiscal discipline on the numbers the government inherited. What followed it was not a return to discipline so much as a fourteen-month run of reversals: cancel the mega-project in November 2024, hand the pumped hydro portfolio to a new manager in April 2025, publish a new energy roadmap built around gas in October 2025, repeal the legislated targets that had defined the sector's investment case in December 2025, then shelve the cheapest replacement option in favour of a costlier one in 2026. Each step has its own justification. Read together, they describe a government that has spent close to two years narrowing Queensland's energy options without yet landing on a fully funded firming plan that matches the scale of what it removed.
The remaining flagship suggests the underlying problem was relocated rather than solved. Borumba was meant to be the smaller, more manageable pumped hydro project — the one that survived scrutiny. Its cost has still grown by roughly 30 per cent since 2022 and now sits, on CSIRO's own independent benchmark, about 62 per cent above what a comparable pumped hydro scheme should cost. If the objection to Pioneer-Burdekin was that Queensland cannot be trusted to build a multi-billion-dollar pumped hydro project on budget, that objection has not gone away. It has moved to a different dam.
Repealing the legislated renewable targets removes the one mechanism that forced any government, this one included, to report progress against a fixed, numerical yardstick. Queensland's stated commitment to net zero by 2050 remains, but with no legislated interim target there is no equivalent of a court-enforceable milestone letting an outsider check, year by year, whether the state's new gas-and-coal-leaning pathway is actually on track. That is precisely the kind of quantified accountability this masthead argues every government should be held to, and Queensland now has less of it than it did in 2024, not more.
The risk to the future
A reliability gap this decade, and a bigger bill next decade if Borumba repeats the pattern
The nearest-term risk is the one AEMO has already put a number on: an approximate 80-megawatt reliability gap for Queensland this coming summer, in a grid still short of the long-duration storage Pioneer-Burdekin was meant to supply. Gas peaking plants can close a gap like that quickly, but every extra gigawatt of gas capacity commits Queensland to a fuel whose price the state does not set, at a time when domestic supply and export demand are both under pressure on the east coast. Extending coal operation buys the same time at the cost of relying on power stations that are, by definition, ageing and more prone to the unplanned outages already showing up in AEMO's own reliability data.
The longer-term risk sits with Borumba. If the project that survived the 2024 reset repeats the pattern that killed the one that did not — a cost estimate that keeps climbing after commitment, on a technology CSIRO's own benchmarking says Queensland is now paying well above the going rate for — the state faces the same choice again in the early 2030s, at a larger scale and with less time to find an alternative before ageing coal units are due to retire. Without a legislated target to measure progress against, and without a firming pipeline yet built at anything like the scale Pioneer-Burdekin was meant to provide, the risk is not that Queensland chose wrongly in November 2024. It is that, more than eighteen months on, the state still cannot point to a fully costed and funded plan that gets it to a reliable, affordable grid by any particular date.