We do it in New Zealand. The power source is renewable and dirt cheap thanks to the games Rio Tinto play, which have resulted in the population subsidising them.
Rio Tinto have a poor record and leave toxic waste in various places. It seems possible that the taxpayer will be tidying up their mess.
Quebec too. And Quebec is far from landlocked, so an abundance of hydroelectricity has alternative markets.
The subsidies are staggering:
> The total cost of $2.7 billion comes to $274,338 per job per year during 35 years for the 740 jobs in the new plant. If we use the figure of 10.0 cents/kWh, which is the expected cost of new projects under study, the cost per job per year rises to $370,864
And these are 2007 number!!! And no, the smelters aren't paying their employees FAANG wages.
> It is far more profitable to export electricity directly
through interconnections than indirectly through aluminum ingots.
Alcoa had a pretty large aluminum smelter on the west coast in Ferndale WA, but it shut down near the beginning of covid. The bonneville power contracts with Alcoa were pretty generous, somewhere around $0.035/kWh for ~300MW, and even then, they couldn't make it work.
A PE firm is trying to buy it up, but the bonneville administration isn't playing ball and giving them the same rates, so it'll likely sit empty.
Cheap power requires good infrastructure which countries with cheap labor generally dont have. There are locales in US with pretty good electricity rates