Neither of these assumptions are based on anything other than "That's the number we had to put in to the model to get the conclusion we want".
I can't comment on the cost of Gas Turbines.
But the opposite is true for batteries.
Battery production is being invested in heavily. There are new types of batteries (like sodium ion) that are extremely relevant to the article that it barely even mentions. The pitch for those is of course no lithium, better temperature ranges, less need for cooling/heating them, much better fire safety, better durability, etc. This all adds up to lower cost when done at scale. That all adds up to a lot less cost for especially grid storage.
I agree the 33% number is meaningless. It's probably too conservative. The article actually does not talk about new battery chemistries like sodium ion. And given that large scale factories are already producing those by the tens of gwh, I think that's more than a little oversight. Additionally, there are learning effects that explain the large differences in prices between markets that the article mentions. Those are optimizations that countries have yet to implement. Some might not get around to that any time soon (like the US seems a bit of a basket case on cost/efficiency for a lot of things).
Because of the improvements in battery cost relative to the stagnating improvements in gas turbines, gas turbine manufacturers are going to be conservative in investing in new production capacity. A lot of companies that say right now that they are going to want to buy gas turbines might no longer want to in a few years. For example the low cost and ready availability of solar+battery might be persuasive for some. Investing many billions in new production capacity that won't come online until some time next decade is highly risky if the projected demand could evaporate. The reason there is a shortage is that that's what they thought five to ten years ago as well. So, it's easy to predict that turbine shortages might continue to exist.
IIRC there are something like 3 companies on earth that can make gas turbine blades, as it's a particularly difficult process, and they are sold out for the foreseeable future. New capacity is severely constrained and cannot meet demand.
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?
(Though I really want to see a fast reactor coupled to a supercritical CO2 or helium brayton cycle turbine!)
Zero.
And I really mean zero, not a negative value. That is, when Elon Musk promises something, it doesn't mean he won't do it, it means that it is just as likely to do it as if he didn't promise anything.
I don't understand why people listen to him when it comes to predictions, he is as close to a random generator as one can get. Even analyzing his actions come with a lot of uncertainty, though not as much as what he says, some things are too big to hide. Being able to maintain such level of uncertainty is probably part of his success, he is like a poker player no one can read.
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.
The demand for energy is the only thing we can be sure will grow.
Is the conduit batteries or gas turbines, who knows.
There’s still a fuckton of oil in the world, imo there’s still giant undiscovered reserves in the Arctic and Canada in general
If you’ve got interesting reads on gas vs green/battery in 2026 post Iran war feel free to post below
The popular number is that every 18 months, China was destroying 1 million BPD demand.
I mean electricity, energy, power, how the hell do we even refer to this correctly? Generated electrical output? lol
> 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-...
That said, I doubt the cost of either of these technologies is driven so much by the technologies themselves so much as it is our ability to manufacture and install large volumes of them at scale. Presumably it's easier to mass-manufacture batteries in a big factory and then ship them to the site than it is to construct each gas peaker plant on location, and moreover it's probably easier (i.e. cheaper) to scale up the manufacturing process for batteries than it is to scale up the construction process for peaker plants.
Yes, and this is the assumption that the comment I replied to seems to disagree with. I think the assumption is right and the disagreement is wrong.
> That said, I doubt the cost of either of these technologies is driven so much by the technologies themselves so much as it is our ability to manufacture and install large volumes of them at scale.
Deployment is part of the learning curve.
I think you're agreeing with me (and disagreeing with the comment I replied to) here :)
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.
China leads the world in battery manufacturing, it's not really so hard in an absolute sense, but gee do you have to get the cost down and get the quality up so you don't have batteries blow up because of manufacturing defects.
To make gas turbines though you need to get the last bit of performance available out of metals, manufacture parts with punishing tolerances, and do it with high quality so turbines don't blow up because of manufacturing defects. At this point in time China cannot make competitive gas turbines. China's COMAC C919 airliner is 100% dependent on western engines for instance.
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.
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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).