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').
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?
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).