I would go the contrarian way and suggest Snowy 2 is one of several examples that demonstrate that spending the same amount of money on more renewable generation and some battery storage would provide more reliable power for less money.

Which makes the geography question moot. But most people's intuitions on renewables/battery are years out of date so it's confusing to respond to their sarcastic "are we just going to build lots of batteries, LOL" with "actually yes that's going to be sensible for 80% of the world's population".

edit: long article comparing Snowy to more solar plus batteries:

https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-stora...

That's a weird article. It simultaneously argues that between batteries and snowy 2 there is no clear winner, that snowy 2 is a white elephant and that:

>Hornsdale Power Reserve: $690 per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity. If Snowy Hydro 2 comes in at $10 billion, its cost per kilowatt of power will be $5,000, which is 5.6 times more than Hornsdale. But its cost per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity is much lower no matter if you think $20, $29, or $250 is appropriate.

In other words in terms of storing a large volume of energy, cheaply, at high efficiency, pumped storage blows everything else out of the metaphorical water - between 3x and 34.5x cheaper!

I would say that batteries and large scale pumped storage complement each other. I don't agree that Australia will regret building it.

That article is completely mad. But it does admit the following:

  The main drawbacks [of battery storage] are: At the moment, it has a much higher cost per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity. Much shorter lifespan.

  If we consider Snowy Hydro 2’s maximum possible energy storage capacity, it comes to only $20 to $29 per kilowatt-hour

  $5,000 [buys] 5.16 kilowatt-hours of Hornsdale storage

That is, Snowy Hydro is an order of magnitude cheaper for storage.

The article continuously harps on about kW comparisons, and ignores comparing kWh storage: foolish for an article supposedly about electricity storage. For example the article makes the inane point: “If Snowy Hydro 2 comes in at $10 billion, its cost per kilowatt of power output comes to… $5,000 per kilowatt. That’s not cheap. Gas generation normally comes to under $1,000 per kilowatt.”, and again “Snowy 2 Vs. Hornsdale: Assuming Snowy Hydro 2 costs $5,000 per kilowatt of power output, for that cost, we could instead buy . . .”.

Utter rubbish.