The government of the state of South Australia announced recently that its wholesale electricity price fell in Q4 ’25 to $37 AU per megawatt hour ( / MWh) (that would be $26.22 US). That’s the lowest wholesale electricity price in all of the continent of Australia. The reason the price is so low is because South Australia has a lot of wind, solar and battery power, and output was high late last year. Remember, October – December in Australia is spring into summer.

That’s 2.6 US cents per kilowatt hour. The average cost of electricity in the United States is roughly 17 cents per kilowatt hour, because it is mostly generated by expensive, dirty, planet-wrecking fossil fuels.

So here’s the thing: in Q3 of last year, the price of wholesale electricity was $104 AU / MWh.

That’s right. In one three-month period, the price fell by a third.

Since South Australia is demonstrating that wind, solar and battery can cause the wholesale price of electricity to plummet, it is also pulling the curtain from the Trump administration’s con game in the US.

It was not a matter of usage falling off. The government says, “underlying demand in South Australia ticked up by 1.2 per cent to a fourth quarter record high of 1,624 MW.”

Of course, how the fall in the price of wholesale electricity gets translated into consumers’ home electricity bills is politics, not engineering.

Some 74% of South Australia’s electricity consumption is provided by renewables, and the state plans to make that 100% by 2027, in only two years. Wind, solar and battery generated 100% of the state’s electricity for 99 days (27% of the time) in 2024, the last year for which full data are available as yet.

50% of homes in the state have rooftop solar. South Australia has been a pioneer in mega-batteries combined with its solar generation. The country as a whole has 3 gigawatts of battery storage capacity. South Australian needs more battery build-out, so as to smooth out the excess generation from rooftop solar at noon and during early afternoon, which........

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