500,000 homes

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title: "500,000 homes" claim: "The project will act as a giant 2,000 megawatt battery in the centre of the National Energy Market, providing enough power for 500,000 homes." caption: "A megawatt is a tap. A week of homes is a tank. The slogan used both as one number." status: featured example: false published: 2026-08-15T17:02:00+10:00 person: Malcolm Turnbull claimType: no-evidence-required year: 2017 tags: [turnbull, snowy, energy, capacity, "2017"] source: url: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-21/snowy-hydro-2.0-could-actually-cost-as-much-as-$4.5b/9277368 date: "2017-12-21" publisher: ABC News title: "Snowy Hydro 2.0 could actually cost as much as $4.5b — more than double the initial price tag" quote: "The project will act as a giant 2,000 megawatt battery in the centre of the National Energy Market, providing enough power for 500,000 homes" evidence: path: 2017/five-hundred-thousand-homes/source.md kind: note captured: "2026-08-14"

Malcolm Turnbull, 21 December 2017, the night the feasibility study dropped. ABC: a “giant 2,000 megawatt battery,” “enough power for 500,000 homes.” Same week in March he had already tried the other unit: in one hour, 20 times South Australia’s proposed 100 MW battery, “constantly for almost a week,” “350,000 MW hours over seven days.”

This card files that mix. It does not file “the turbines are fake.”

What did have a receipt:

• 2,000 MW is power — how hard the tap can run. 350 GWh is energy — how long the tank lasts at that rate. 500,000 homes is a power slogan. A week is an energy slogan. They are not the same house-count.
• The 2023 reset quietly lifted the tap to 2,200 MW and swapped the house-count for three million homes for a week. The tank was always ~350 GWh. The homes multiplied.
• Paul Broad, March 2017: it would “absolutely” help keep the lights on. The lights it is keeping, in 2026, are still the old scheme’s. First power is listed for late 2027.

Grammar: giant battery, 2,000 MW, 500,000 homes. Logic: a tap is not a tank. Rhetoric: 20 times.