Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

So the writing is on the wall for fossil fuels.

What's also important is that gas combined cycle kind of represented the end state of maximum power for minimum cost from fossil fuels. Wind and especially solar (perovskites, etc) and storage (sodium chemistries, etc) have lots of runway for further cost drops. So you might squeeze a couple percent out of gas combined cycle for LCOE in the next decade, but solar/wind may still drop by 50%.

So if you have a ten year view (which is what you have fore investment in power projects) fossil fuel projects (and alas nuclear, which is 6x more expensive than wind/solar) simply don't balance the sheet.

Lots of hope. Lots of work to do.

EDIT: response to "why do you think solar/wind have bigger runway to drop in price:" (I hit my post limit)

Wind can simply scale up more, and there are other designs coming online. Wind I don't have the holy-crap-this-is-still-coming thing.

Solar however has made its gains with silicon, but perovskites are simply dirt cheap to manufacture, IF they can eliminate lead and get them to last long enough. I'm spitballing, but perovskites will probably drop the cost by 50% long term in solar.

Solar also really hasn't developed large scale multijunction, and perovskites + silicon may enable that. Multijunction is how you get the higher efficiencies by capturing more wavelengths and the like.

As for gas turbine, they already are exceeding the carnot efficiencies by capturing downstream heat cycles and other tricks. And I think the other thing as an energy financeer I'd worry about is that any fossil fuel power generation has to be worried about an eventual carbon tax imposed.

As the political power of oil companies wanes as their economic strength withers away as EVs and alternative energy undermine their economic value proposition, their ability to keep the environmental lobby from imposing a proper externality tax on carbon emissions with falter.

So any gas generation power plant could overnight have their costs increased by 10-50% or maybe worse. Best case: you have to pay for bullshit offsets, which will probably increase costs 10-20%. Medium case: they have to explicitly pay for the carbon scrubbing/removal, probably 50% increase or more to the generation cost. Worst case: we realize that fossil fuels carbon taxes should include a cost to remove PREVIOUSLY UNTAXED carbon that is sitting in the atmosphere. So then the cost could be exhorbitantly increased.

Likely SOMETHING is coming that will increase the cost of fossil fuel power and fuels due to carbon removal. It will start small and increase as the political strength of oil / gas wanes.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361094

At some point we may still need small gas power plants to charge the batteries but how many days a year would we have to do that?

It may be a touchy subject, but to me Nuclear power is absolutely not the future because for the money you can deploy so much renewables, including batteries, it just doesn't make sense. And they are never on time and on budget.

The regulations have some work to do catch up to allowing batteries to operate in a straightforward manner. For example, the big battery we launched in Texas had to be registered as both a generator and a controllable load with all sorts of weird issues around switching from discharging (being a generator) to charging (being a load) that a battery wants to do all the time. We found engineering solutions to them, but it's even better that the market operators are working on properly recognizing batteries as their own unique asset with their own advantages and challenges.