I've seen people saying they pay $0.03/KWh
In the UK that price is $0.32/KWh so largely prohibitive to do any large scale mining.
The price of $0.03/KWh is for enterprise contracts only. The price of $0.32/KWh is for the general public. Anywhere, you can get very low contracts compared to the public commercial value, it may not be as low as $0.03/KWh, but it is not impossible.
However, it is not the mining industry that has to force the cost of energy to fall, especially because it is not something that is directly in its hands to be able to do so. The mining industry needs to focus on what it has control over, and what it has control over is the mining hardware. This is where it needs to invest in research to improve.
Instead of investing in buying more machines, they should have used the money to invest in research.
I agree the mining hardware does need to improve both in terms of efficiency and hash rate.
I suspect that's going to be a difficult challenge at best given the ASIC's used in most miners are only a stage or two behind leading edge in terms of silicon geometry and process size.
Unless someone comes up with a more energy efficient way to calculate SHA256 on scale, I dont think there's going to be massive gains unless the ASIC manufacturers jump the the latest GAA (Gate All Around), Backside power delivery and process nodes for silicon 3nm etc, which apparently offer significant efficiency gains.
However these will likely come at a premium and not be on offer to many manfuacturers until the process nodes have been field tested, so it may be a few years before we see these technologies being used in SHA256 ASICs.