I’d like to take a moment to praise the writing here. Rigorous, dense, and well-organized; communicative rather than coughing up tables of raw figures in prose form.
I’d refer to the source studies, but at $9,990 per region… Ms Pickerel’s overview seems plenty informative for me.
Regarding EMEA:
> Grid-scale battery storage costs are now decisively cheaper than gas peaking across the region. [and price will fall another 33% in the decade ahead]. This shift means storage is displacing open-cycle gas turbines on cost in every gas market across the region, marking a significant structural turning point for power system planning across both the Gulf and Africa.
The analyst’s bottom line:
> From Latin America to Asia Pacific, the combination of falling storage costs and world-class renewable resources is closing off the economic case for new gas peaking capacity, while long-term contracted renewables increasingly set the ceiling rather than the floor on power costs.”
Heady times! For all the gnashing of teeth about regulating our way out of combustion-based production—it’s ultimately superior technology that’s ripened to displace gas peaker plants, no arm-twisting required. “Not with a bang, but a whimper”…
> In the Middle East and Africa, where utility-scale solar already leads at $37/MWh, four-hour storage is forecast to fall a further 33% to $80/MWh by 2035
I'm struggling to understand the numbers here. How does a fall of 33% on $37 make it $80?
I think the $37 might be the cost of producing the energy via solar, and it’s the grid-scale batteries that are expected to get cheaper:
> Four-hour storage reaches $120/MWh in 2026 and is forecast to fall 33% to $80/MWh by 2035, cementing its role as the enabling technology for solar and wind integration.
Cheap or not, solar isn’t dispatchable on demand, so in and of itself it doesn’t replace the role of a peaker plant. But now that the big batteries are a viable thing, solar-plus-battery is feasible to handle the parts of the demand curve that required open-cycle gas plants before.
My understanding is that the first number is the "cost per MWh generated by a PV plant", the second one is the "cost per MWh accumulated and then released by a 4-hour grid-scale battery plant"
This entire article seems to be based on an assumption that the cost of batteries will go down 33% over the next 10 years because demand is so high, but costs of gas turbines will go up over the next 10 years because demand is so high.
Neither of these assumptions are based on anything other than "That's the number we had to put in to the model to get the conclusion we want".
The cost of batteries has gone down somewhere between 60-80% over the previous 10 years (and my understanding is that trend is expected to continue due to a combination of new technologies (e.g. Sodium Ion) and increased scale). So that one seems totally reasonable. A little conservative if anything.
Battery tech and production methods are still evolving and improving way faster than turbine tech and production. Meaning this is more than just production capacity.
Swanson's law and learning rates do seem to apply to batteries more as well as the fact that their no of cycles seem to be much longer than initially thought for LFP as well as storage focused Sodium ion batteries from CATL
Supply is larger than demand for batteries and prices are going down. Demand is larger than supply for natural gas turbines and prices are going up.
But that's just the short term.
More importantly, I believe that manufacturers are more confident in the long term future of demand for batteries so are willing to continue to invest. People are going to be buying electric cars 10 years from now. The demand for gas turbines in 10 years seems a lot more murky.
SpaceX has promised to start making turbines, which would bring their price down. But it's an Elon Musk promise, so how much weight do you put on it?
Point on Musk's problematic delivery record. But for an extremely complex type of critical equipment, in a market this tight, I don't know if there's any provider you'd want to fully trust to deliver on time.
One enduring insight from Brian Potter (Construction Physics) is that the cost of manufacturing tends to go down with scale, while the cost of construction doesn't drop nearly as much. Batteries are made in a factory and then pretty much just hooked up, while gas turbines have to be built. So, the difference in forecasts makes sense if you apply that rule.
There have been some experiments with prefabricated construction, but you still run into the issue that shipping really big things is hard, as we've seen with wind turbine blades. Robotic construction might make a dent at some point, but it still seems to be basically embryonic.
> Every time the global cumulative battery production has doubled, the price has dropped by roughly 19%.
There are only a handful of gas turbine manufacturers left, with a manufacturing backlog of half a decade.
It is exceptionally obvious battery manufacturing will only continue to scale (TAM is global EV and stationary storage market), and gas turbine builders will hang on until the economics turn, which they have. Regardless, these trajectories will hold unless something exceptional occurs. Is it likely we’ll build more batteries faster? Yes. Is it likely these are the last three major gas turbine manufacturers to exist? Also yes. Last call for buggy whips.
If you had asked me whether I see more potential for battery prices to go down than turbine prices I would 100% say that batteries have more potential. Why?
1. Because there is a lot of pressure for them to go down, in literally every form of technology, be it phones, robots, drones, EVs, ... Turbines are also important, but they have had that pressure for decades and are relatively finished. Any further improvement will give diminishing results outside of specialized applications and demands
2. Because the technology for batteries is relatively open ended in comparison. Turbine prices are mainly about how that steel can be precision engineered and while there is some innovation at this front, the gains from that innovation have slowed for a while now. With batteries however the race is still very open and it would not be naive to assume some new chemistry will be found that reduces the cost and energy density drastically.
I don't know the economics around precision engineering well enough to intelligently how high demand impacts the manufacturing cost, but I could imagine it behaving slightly different than the cost of simpler processes, especially since good CNC machines are hefty investments.
TLDR: Every where but some parts of the USA, solar + battery is the cheapest source of new power generation. Tariffs and subsidies continue to prop up gas generation. 40% YOY drop in battery prices!? Solar + battery is still on the cost learning curve (no where near plateau), whereas gas (extraction, turbines, etc) plateaued a while back.
--
That episode (and Ember's report) looks back at 2025.
So it couldn't account for this year's increased prices and volatility for gas, or data centers increasing the demand for gas turbines.
Globally, solar + battery adoption continues to accelerate. In the USA, big tech forfeited their climate pledges (choosing to use gas) and new solar + battery continues to be blocked by our constipated connection queue (to the grid).
The basic unit of analysis in think tanks and media is nameplate capacity, ie a MW of four-hour battery would be compared to a MW of gas turbines.
The most important driver of power system costs is "firm capacity"; a MW of four-hour battery might be 10%-50% as valuable as a MW of gas turbines given that the latter will run for 100-1000 hours per year when the batteries are empty and the prices are much higher. This is true on the grid or behind the meter.
That seems fairly obvious, but afaik the problem is not bridging four hours, it’s bridging a cloudy week without wind in winter. For that gas currently seems cheaper
The article does the annoying thing of using a technical term without definining it.
An open-cycle gas turbine is the "simple" configuration that draws in air through a pressurization stage, into a combustion chamber for fuel combustion, producing high-pressure hot gases that drive a turbine and generate power, with exhaust gases released into the atmosphere.
In other words, there is no recovery of heat from the exhaust, it's basically an aircraft jet engine core mounted on the ground and connected to a generator. They aren't very efficient but they are compact, relatively cheap, and quick to spin up during peak demand times.
I guess the point is that when combined with a source of dispatchable base load power like a combined cycle gas turbine or nuclear, batteries are now cheaper than open cycle gas peaker plants for bridging short (4 hours or less) spikes in demand.
This is exactly what they are going for. To not have to build and run expensive gas plants just for a few hours in the evening. It also allows you to run the few gas plants that you do build for longer to better amortize their build costs, making them less expensive overall.
FWIW, the latest analysis I've seen seems to suggest that biomethane is probably the way to go for last-resort long term backup. Hydrogen is just too fickle.
What does it mean for a gas to be 'fickle'? Hydrogen gets stored long term all the time. It's made in refineries and used in chemical plants all over the world every day. It's expensive to store, but it's certainly doable with the right metallurgy. If your goal is reducing carbon emission as much as possible, it's way better than methane, regardless of source.
Hydrogen is a storage medium. It's fundamentally different than natural gas. Think of it more like a more complex, expensive, and inefficient battery; with the only advantage being that you can store more energy per unit volume at large scales.
The very small molecule makes it much harder to store than methane, and unlike anything else on the planet other than Helium, lost hydrogen is lost forever.
The UK relies far too much on gas turbines, rather than renewables and as a consequence we have energy costs far higher than other European neighbours.
Gas is not cheap, it basically doubles your costs.
Well the goal is to only run the backup a few hundred hours a year, the question is which technology can provide close to 100% of demand a few percent of the time in the cheapest way. Turbines or even gas motors are relatively cheap in capex and gas is easy to store in large quantities.
Gas turbines have a manufacturing backlog of at least a half decade. The longer is takes to build them, the more favorable battery storage is (as it can be installed today), and the faster more battery storage manufacturing spins up, this further drives down the cost.
> For its part, China – a battery manufacturing powerhouse – has no such supply chain issues. It dominates global lithium battery production accounting for two-thirds of it. This relative strength gives it the confidence to relentlessly amplify its BESS footprint as evidenced in the capacity build-up between 2021 and 2026.
> In fact, China’s battery storage build-out has no global parallel thanks to this one factor alone, according to Ember. It estimates that nearly all (i.e.149.8 GW) of China’s “new energy storage” consists of lithium-ion batteries.
> In terms of the future, following a June update to its 15th Five-Year Plan, China is now aiming to deploy 300 GW of new energy storage by 2030. That would keep the country’s BESS industry progression, that outgrows all other countries combined, firmly on track.
Renewables require gas in the UK. There is no realistic route to 100% renewable grid without gas currently. I did some modelling of this and you'd require something on the order of 4000GWh of battery storage. We currently have 40GWh.
Gas is far, far cheaper than building ~£1T worth of battery storage. Even if prices dropped, you are still looking at multi-hundred billions, and you still need the renewable capacity on top of that.
Arguably if we had spent the £100bns (in subsidy and transmission upgrade and curtailment costs) we've already spent on renewables on nuclear instead we would have a very clean grid, even at crazy UK nuclear build prices, and stable electricity prices.
Last time I did the maths based on data from gridwatch the storage capacity required dropped dramatically if you over built the on the production side.
But ok, 30 million homes, 100kWh storage each, that's 3000 GWh
A 100kWh battery is about £25k, less than 1/10th the cost of the house, and less than the average new car
You are making the mistake of thinking that if the grid could provide 100% renewable energy on a windy day at noon in summer, it could also provide 100% renewable energy at night in winter with no wind. Obviously that’s not accurate. Renewables provide energy in a highly volatile sine wave. It’s the bottom of the sine wave which determines the capacity required for base load and dispatchable generation, not the top of the wave.
[Gas is about 11-13x cheaper than renewables with externalities like grid restructure and volatility imputed.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) That’s not to say renewables don’t have their place in modern grids. In fact an optimal allocation is around 80% renewable in the UK. However, until battery storage becomes about 95% cheaper, it would be ASTRONOMICALLY expensive to make the grid 100% renewable. Trillions of pounds in the UK. An order of magnitude more expensive than just paying higher gas prices.
People often make the mistake of thinking that because wind and sun is free, the cost of energy generation is basically free. Those people don’t understand how many fixed and marginal costs there are. If you’re interested, the paper above provides good insights into those costs.
Yes, I have no doubt we can hit even a 90-95% renewable grid. It's the last 5% that is impossible to do without gas.
The cost of those last few percent is absolutely eye watering. The current plan to get it to 100% net zero is by having gas for the final 5% then using carbon capture and storage to offset the emissions.
It is not even the final 5%, it is the final 1-2%, because you need a multi-week dunkelflaute across Europe for the gas turbines to be needed in the future. A lot will also just be curtailing. For instance EV charging might be restricted in the future in such a winter black out scenario.
Put another way, you need the gas turbines for the two week dunkelflaute (winter doldrums). Given that you have the turbines already, when are batteries cheaper than running the turbines for a few hours every evening?
A more interesting question than the cheapest 4 hour solution. I think that answer might also be batteries soon.
This; batteries are still ungodly expensive for seasonal or long-term storage.
And what happens if you need to satisfy peak demand for more than four hours at a time (and you will)? You still need some generators or overprovisoned batteries.
> For onshore wind, continuous capex and opex improvements are expected to drive LCOE down 16% by 2060
What’s with the forecasts going as far out as 2060?? Given the scale of changes we’ve seen in just the last 10 years, looking forward 34 years seems absurd, and to still only expect a 16% drop in cost?
Unlike solar, wind has pretty significant construction and material costs which feel hard to diminish with scale. You still need to excavate earth, install giant pylons, enormous magnets, etc.
That being said, anyone who has predicted the future prices of renewable energy seems destined to look a fool.
solve the two problems with datacenters with a single solution.
solar panels & batteries in the texas oil patch or sw or mexico... morocco or spain.. australia...
everything associated with datacenters does not pay tariffs. tech leaders could lead the way here and not only provide AI but also potentially take big steps towards solving the climate crisis.
certainly cheaper than putting panels in space. (do the math)
Come on - thats not solving all the problems that you buy GENERATORS for. 4 hour bridge is great - but emergency power or always on -- 4 hours is not enough.
First step is to do massive vertical solar in cities everywhere. Zero cost of [land, long distance transmission lines, transmission infrastructure]. There are already structural elements of a building, dirt cheap solar panels can be hung vertically at a minimal cost, or cost nothing (after building code is updated to require all buildings to have structural features to support vertical solar.All cities have buildings, all buildings have surfaces. In addition, there are walls/fences. This adds ~4 hours of extra solar production.
Next is EVs as energy storage. People buy cars anyways. An EV looks, works, functions and smells exact like a gas car. Some might even say it smells better. Its not like going from horses to cars, nothing that radical. With EVs, we add a TON of storage. 20% or more solar production is curtailed, all of this can go to EVs. EVs can supply power back to the grid. Or power home throughout the night.
Finally, add BESS if needed.
28% of trips are under a mile, 52% under three, 64% under five, 79% under ten, 93% under twenty-five, and 98% under 50 miles. Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles! EVs have humongous batteries, you can control the level of charge/discharge from the grid
People should be paid for using their EVs. They are after all providing critical, highly resilient infrastructure at no cost to govts and utilities. I don't think there is any compelling reason to make the super-billionaires like Warren Buffet richer.
Expensive prime arable land in the UK is rentable for £200 per hectare per year. You can buy it for £20k a hectare (land value is far higher than usable value due to tax avoidance schemes -- nobody spends £20k on a field to rent it out for £200 a year)
But even if you buy 100 hectares of land for £2m, you then need to build your 60MW, which costs about £60m on top and generates 60GWh a year or £6m at 10p/unit
I’d refer to the source studies, but at $9,990 per region… Ms Pickerel’s overview seems plenty informative for me.
Regarding EMEA:
> Grid-scale battery storage costs are now decisively cheaper than gas peaking across the region. [and price will fall another 33% in the decade ahead]. This shift means storage is displacing open-cycle gas turbines on cost in every gas market across the region, marking a significant structural turning point for power system planning across both the Gulf and Africa.
The analyst’s bottom line:
> From Latin America to Asia Pacific, the combination of falling storage costs and world-class renewable resources is closing off the economic case for new gas peaking capacity, while long-term contracted renewables increasingly set the ceiling rather than the floor on power costs.”
Heady times! For all the gnashing of teeth about regulating our way out of combustion-based production—it’s ultimately superior technology that’s ripened to displace gas peaker plants, no arm-twisting required. “Not with a bang, but a whimper”…
What's the ecological impact of constructing all these batteries?
I'm struggling to understand the numbers here. How does a fall of 33% on $37 make it $80?
> Four-hour storage reaches $120/MWh in 2026 and is forecast to fall 33% to $80/MWh by 2035, cementing its role as the enabling technology for solar and wind integration.
Cheap or not, solar isn’t dispatchable on demand, so in and of itself it doesn’t replace the role of a peaker plant. But now that the big batteries are a viable thing, solar-plus-battery is feasible to handle the parts of the demand curve that required open-cycle gas plants before.
Neither of these assumptions are based on anything other than "That's the number we had to put in to the model to get the conclusion we want".
I can't comment on the cost of Gas Turbines.
But the opposite is true for batteries.
But that's just the short term.
More importantly, I believe that manufacturers are more confident in the long term future of demand for batteries so are willing to continue to invest. People are going to be buying electric cars 10 years from now. The demand for gas turbines in 10 years seems a lot more murky.
SpaceX has promised to start making turbines, which would bring their price down. But it's an Elon Musk promise, so how much weight do you put on it?
There have been some experiments with prefabricated construction, but you still run into the issue that shipping really big things is hard, as we've seen with wind turbine blades. Robotic construction might make a dent at some point, but it still seems to be basically embryonic.
> Every time the global cumulative battery production has doubled, the price has dropped by roughly 19%.
There are only a handful of gas turbine manufacturers left, with a manufacturing backlog of half a decade.
It is exceptionally obvious battery manufacturing will only continue to scale (TAM is global EV and stationary storage market), and gas turbine builders will hang on until the economics turn, which they have. Regardless, these trajectories will hold unless something exceptional occurs. Is it likely we’ll build more batteries faster? Yes. Is it likely these are the last three major gas turbine manufacturers to exist? Also yes. Last call for buggy whips.
https://www.enverus.com/blog/the-queue-before-the-queue-gevs...
https://fgermini.substack.com/p/heavy-duty-gas-turbines-the-...
1. Because there is a lot of pressure for them to go down, in literally every form of technology, be it phones, robots, drones, EVs, ... Turbines are also important, but they have had that pressure for decades and are relatively finished. Any further improvement will give diminishing results outside of specialized applications and demands
2. Because the technology for batteries is relatively open ended in comparison. Turbine prices are mainly about how that steel can be precision engineered and while there is some innovation at this front, the gains from that innovation have slowed for a while now. With batteries however the race is still very open and it would not be naive to assume some new chemistry will be found that reduces the cost and energy density drastically.
I don't know the economics around precision engineering well enough to intelligently how high demand impacts the manufacturing cost, but I could imagine it behaving slightly different than the cost of simpler processes, especially since good CNC machines are hefty investments.
https://www.woodmac.com/reports/power-markets-north-america-...
Here's a prior take on this topic:
The big stories from the last year in electricity [2026-04] https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-big-stories-from-the-last-year
Global Electricity Review 2026 https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
TLDR: Every where but some parts of the USA, solar + battery is the cheapest source of new power generation. Tariffs and subsidies continue to prop up gas generation. 40% YOY drop in battery prices!? Solar + battery is still on the cost learning curve (no where near plateau), whereas gas (extraction, turbines, etc) plateaued a while back.
--
That episode (and Ember's report) looks back at 2025.
So it couldn't account for this year's increased prices and volatility for gas, or data centers increasing the demand for gas turbines.
Globally, solar + battery adoption continues to accelerate. In the USA, big tech forfeited their climate pledges (choosing to use gas) and new solar + battery continues to be blocked by our constipated connection queue (to the grid).
The most important driver of power system costs is "firm capacity"; a MW of four-hour battery might be 10%-50% as valuable as a MW of gas turbines given that the latter will run for 100-1000 hours per year when the batteries are empty and the prices are much higher. This is true on the grid or behind the meter.
Those turbines aren't great for longer periods, they're pointlessly inefficient if you don't need their ability to peak for short periods.
An open-cycle gas turbine is the "simple" configuration that draws in air through a pressurization stage, into a combustion chamber for fuel combustion, producing high-pressure hot gases that drive a turbine and generate power, with exhaust gases released into the atmosphere.
In other words, there is no recovery of heat from the exhaust, it's basically an aircraft jet engine core mounted on the ground and connected to a generator. They aren't very efficient but they are compact, relatively cheap, and quick to spin up during peak demand times.
Well, other than destroying the planet, but hey, let's just hide those costs.
Gas is not cheap, it basically doubles your costs.
https://www.enverus.com/blog/the-queue-before-the-queue-gevs...
https://www.energyconnects.com/opinion/thought-leadership/20...
> For its part, China – a battery manufacturing powerhouse – has no such supply chain issues. It dominates global lithium battery production accounting for two-thirds of it. This relative strength gives it the confidence to relentlessly amplify its BESS footprint as evidenced in the capacity build-up between 2021 and 2026.
> In fact, China’s battery storage build-out has no global parallel thanks to this one factor alone, according to Ember. It estimates that nearly all (i.e.149.8 GW) of China’s “new energy storage” consists of lithium-ion batteries.
> In terms of the future, following a June update to its 15th Five-Year Plan, China is now aiming to deploy 300 GW of new energy storage by 2030. That would keep the country’s BESS industry progression, that outgrows all other countries combined, firmly on track.
(battery storage printer goes brrr)
Gas is far, far cheaper than building ~£1T worth of battery storage. Even if prices dropped, you are still looking at multi-hundred billions, and you still need the renewable capacity on top of that.
Arguably if we had spent the £100bns (in subsidy and transmission upgrade and curtailment costs) we've already spent on renewables on nuclear instead we would have a very clean grid, even at crazy UK nuclear build prices, and stable electricity prices.
But ok, 30 million homes, 100kWh storage each, that's 3000 GWh
A 100kWh battery is about £25k, less than 1/10th the cost of the house, and less than the average new car
That doesn't seem unrealistic.
[Gas is about 11-13x cheaper than renewables with externalities like grid restructure and volatility imputed.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) That’s not to say renewables don’t have their place in modern grids. In fact an optimal allocation is around 80% renewable in the UK. However, until battery storage becomes about 95% cheaper, it would be ASTRONOMICALLY expensive to make the grid 100% renewable. Trillions of pounds in the UK. An order of magnitude more expensive than just paying higher gas prices.
People often make the mistake of thinking that because wind and sun is free, the cost of energy generation is basically free. Those people don’t understand how many fixed and marginal costs there are. If you’re interested, the paper above provides good insights into those costs.
The cost of those last few percent is absolutely eye watering. The current plan to get it to 100% net zero is by having gas for the final 5% then using carbon capture and storage to offset the emissions.
Or indeed when petrol runs out as happens occasionally (in 2022 most recently). Of course there's also the problem of gas supplies stopping
Put another way, you need the gas turbines for the two week dunkelflaute (winter doldrums). Given that you have the turbines already, when are batteries cheaper than running the turbines for a few hours every evening?
A more interesting question than the cheapest 4 hour solution. I think that answer might also be batteries soon.
And what happens if you need to satisfy peak demand for more than four hours at a time (and you will)? You still need some generators or overprovisoned batteries.
What’s with the forecasts going as far out as 2060?? Given the scale of changes we’ve seen in just the last 10 years, looking forward 34 years seems absurd, and to still only expect a 16% drop in cost?
That being said, anyone who has predicted the future prices of renewable energy seems destined to look a fool.
solar panels & batteries in the texas oil patch or sw or mexico... morocco or spain.. australia...
everything associated with datacenters does not pay tariffs. tech leaders could lead the way here and not only provide AI but also potentially take big steps towards solving the climate crisis.
certainly cheaper than putting panels in space. (do the math)
Battery is load balancing not generation.
Next is EVs as energy storage. People buy cars anyways. An EV looks, works, functions and smells exact like a gas car. Some might even say it smells better. Its not like going from horses to cars, nothing that radical. With EVs, we add a TON of storage. 20% or more solar production is curtailed, all of this can go to EVs. EVs can supply power back to the grid. Or power home throughout the night.
Finally, add BESS if needed.
28% of trips are under a mile, 52% under three, 64% under five, 79% under ten, 93% under twenty-five, and 98% under 50 miles. Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles! EVs have humongous batteries, you can control the level of charge/discharge from the grid
People should be paid for using their EVs. They are after all providing critical, highly resilient infrastructure at no cost to govts and utilities. I don't think there is any compelling reason to make the super-billionaires like Warren Buffet richer.
Expensive prime arable land in the UK is rentable for £200 per hectare per year. You can buy it for £20k a hectare (land value is far higher than usable value due to tax avoidance schemes -- nobody spends £20k on a field to rent it out for £200 a year)
But even if you buy 100 hectares of land for £2m, you then need to build your 60MW, which costs about £60m on top and generates 60GWh a year or £6m at 10p/unit
The land cost doesn't matter.