Australia is the global renewable energy pathfinder. It is demonstrating that reaching high penetration of solar PV and wind is straightforward at low cost.
Australia is installing solar PV & wind at 10 times the global per capita average rate and 4 times faster per capita than the USA, Japan, Europe or China. Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) and the state of South Australia currently have PV & wind penetrations of 25% and 70% respectively and are tracking towards 40% and 100% respectively in 2024.The current (2021) and market futures (2024) price for electricity is in the range of US$35/MWh which includes both generation and balancing.
In response to rising PV & wind penetration, grid-balancing investment in Australia is predominantly in Gigawatt-scale off-river pumped hydro, batteries, transmission and demand response. Bio, nuclear, hydrogen, power-to-X etc are miniscule or absent. The USA has 35,000 off-river (closed loop) pumped hydro sites with a vast amount of storage (1.4 million GWh). A global atlas of 616,000 sites is available at http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/index.php and details are at https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1cpj3925JEG78m
The Australian experience is highly replicable since it relies exclusively on cheap, mature technologies from vast production runs that utilize vastly available resources. The USA looks a lot like Australia (except 13X bigger population) and could readily follow the Australian path - indeed it is likely to do so, driven by similar market forces.
More details: http://bit.ly/REpathfinder2021