> 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?

> it’s ultimately superior technology that’s ripened to displace gas peaker plants

What's the ecological impact of constructing all these batteries?

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.

I can't comment on the cost of Gas Turbines.

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?

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.

Wouldn't you agree that we're much further along the learning curve for turbines than for large scale battery storage?

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

> 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-...

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.

Regrettably, the authority you crave (linked reports) are paywalled.

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).

They're talking about open-cycle gas turbines which have a specific set of jobs to do for the grid. And which batteries are better at now.

Those turbines aren't great for longer periods, they're pointlessly inefficient if you don't need their ability to peak for short periods.

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.

>For that gas currently seems cheape

Well, other than destroying the planet, but hey, let's just hide those costs.

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.

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.

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.

Your first 2 paragraphs have a few holes before they will be adopted as easily as you pretend.

Land for solar installs isn't close to free. My condo HOA won't even consider solar for any homeowner and the HOA won't approve a giant $50k/unit special assessment (we can't even get 40% of homeowners to vote for HOA elections... which are free).

Older buildings not designed for a solar roof aren't too easy to retrofit. My office window overlooks 2 parking lot structures that were recently retrofitted with solar and it took about 6 weeks for a relatively simple install. I'm pretty sure building owners will only install if they get a cut of the solar generation revenue (so the land isn't free) or if they are able to use it to offset tax or utility costs (also not free).

EVs as batteries are neat but... (1) most owners will likely splurge only for the $500 charger station not the complex electronics which allow the EV to charge the house/grid and (2) cars are frequently driven / parked at work during the peak charging time, so they would be unavailable to absorb the majority of the peak solar generation time.

Until there is a solar EV + charging story for dense housing (apartments and condos), I think most users in my area aren't likely to be able to adopt like you seem to think. Community Solar projects seemed nearly non-existent when I searched in 2018-2020.

Land is peanuts.

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.