There is no grid-scale battery technology to handle baseload for any meaningful duration. Worse, there is no grid-scale battery technology on the horizon either (you can define 'horizon' as the 'next few decades').
We've had things like reservoir lakes for hydro plants for a long time. Energy can be stored in more ways than electrical.
Hydro is great. Gravity batteries (e.g. pumped storage) are great. The problem is that they require particular geography to work - especially at grid-scale, and we pretty much exploited all of it already - so you cannot scale it.
The fact is there is NO infrastructure for any of this. It's also a fact that there are MAJOR (and unsolved) challenges with building out a hydrogen collection/storage/transport (regardless of the source) infrastructure at scale. It's why it hasn't been done even though many governments throw billions into non-fossil fuel initiatives (and even close down working nuclear reactors).
They are already the cheapest in Australia, and at some point, grid-scale batteries are going to be cheaper than gas peakers everywhere.
To do baseload with solar it's easy: deploy enough PV and back that with 20 hours grid scale batteries.
Sources: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/australia-leads-globa...
What we want is battery technology that can serve as baseload for extended period of time when the sun isn't shinning (enough) and wind isn't blowing (enough). The battery farms being built are mainly for "frequency control and ancillary services (FCAS) market" - because they can only store enough energy, generally, for a few minutes, maybe an hour or so. That's not nearly good enough. We need power for days to offset the intermittency of wind and solar (which varies through out the day, as well as throughout the year, and throughout multiple years).
>To do baseload with solar it's easy: deploy enough PV and back that with 20 hours grid scale batteries.
Easy eh. So why isn't it happening?
The reality is that you will not be able to deploy batteries to power even a moderate-sized city for 20 hours with current technology. It isn't going to happen in the next few decades either.
Your argument has been made now for a decade or more. Maybe we need another decade so that, as a society, we can internalize the fact that isn't going to happen.
It is happening, that is my point. Look at the link I posted, what's being installed are 4 hours batteries on GW scale.
It's not.
If in 5 or 10 years nothing meaningfully moves in this area, would you agree this approach was not feasible?
China's results are already pretty poor, they have the same amount of emissions per capita as France when excluding exports but pretty far from the development level though.
Usually developing country emit less because it's easier when you have a large portion of the population which isn't very rich.
What's explaining the bad results of China is the unsustainable middle class powered by those coal plants.
That's quite a feat.
That's quite a hypothetical feat that will not actually happen.
The anti-China stance that this topic reeks of is not useful and only aimed at diverting from our own issues. Let's install as much low emission energy/renewable as they do then we can criticise.
Recently I was looking how many electric vehicles China alone has added in the last 4-5 years and it hit me that had China not gone big on electric the world's oil consumption would be few million barrels per day more and the prices would be above $120+ per barrel.
Solar and wind could be free and it wouldn't change the equation by much .. because .. solar and wind cannot serve as baseload.
Think about it this way, if solar and wind are cheaper, why is China building coal plants? Why was Germany signing multi-decade deals with Russia and building new pipelines (at least before the war) to ship Russia's natural gas? What do they know, that you don't know?
>I predict in 3-4 years China will start removing a lot of coal from its grid as cost of solar and batteries drop another 40-50%.
There is no grid-scale battery technology today, nor coming in the next few decades - so don't pin your hopes on that. It also doesn't matter how cheap Li-ion batteries become because Li-ion batteries are simply not the right technology for grid-scale battery storage.
This is the right question to ask.
China is the global leader in battery and solar tech, yet they are building many coal plants. Why?
The answer is clear, solar and wind (+batteries) as a technology stack, cannot serve as baseload - so they cannot actually replace traditional sources of power (nuclear, fossil fuels, hydro).
The people making decisions to build more coal, and invest in Russian natural gas, understand this. The public seems to not understand it.