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

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'm not sure how bleak it even is. I have some solar powered lights. On a fully cloudy day they maybe are down 50-60% their usual run time by my guess. Not great but not some terrible loss that couldn't be accounted for with more solar buildout overall it would seem.

Maybe there's an argument for managed forests for charcoal energy production too. That would technically be carbon neutral.

This where system thinking, or the lack there of, becomes an issue. You would be right if we only had exactly enough capacity for four hours of power. But of course with batteries now being produced by the multiple twh per year, each of them capable of cycling on a daily basis for a decade or longer, we soon will have quite a bit of battery connected to the grid. If you have a hundred of those four hour systems connected you'd blow fuses throughout the country if you dumped all that power on the grid all at once. That could be days of power under normal usage.

And grids can actually be connected together via cables now. The cliche is that solar panels don't generate at night. But if you connect grids via a long cable running east to west you can actually have solar power at night. And when you connect them north to south you can have solar power on a dark winter day as well. And when you add batteries to the mix (on both sides), you can keep those charged as well and use that power regardless of what time or season it is.

And that's ignoring wind (on and offshore), hydro, nuclear, and other clean forms of power that we currently don't use at scale (geothermal, fusion, etc.). If you add all that to the mix. And cables. And lots of battery. Grid connected car batteries, balcony solar, and all the rest, you end up with a lot of capacity.

Gas power is not going to way. But we probably already have too much of it and it shows in the poor utilization of existing turbines. Ironically, adding more gas turbines to the grid only makes that poor utilization worse for owners of these plants.

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.

Those don't really happen at continent scale.

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.

>For that gas currently seems cheape

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