I question your assumptions about grid storage. The cost of storage has been plummeting alongside the cost of solar, and battery lifespans are a non-issue when capacity is not a factor.
A battery storage facility that has lost 30% of its capacity after 10 years of operation is still functional with that lower capacity. Compare this to something like a car that has much more limited function with a lowered capacity.
Ok, but why then, if storage is not a big problem of solar power, the US has 179 gigawatts of installed solar capacity with rated power of all grid storage on the US grid being 31.6 GW, of that only 4.8 GW being battery storage. [2]
Costs are falling and installs are rapidly increasing? It didn't make sense to build them so far due to limited renewables on grid, you need to regularly produce (a lot) more than load. Like in CA.
And Pumped hydro is great wherever it's possible, don't see why it needs to be pitted against BESS.
The answer to this is obvious. Until very recently, solar was less than 100% of midday electricity. What would have been the point of installing batteries? To charge them with natural gas?
Well, you miss the point: we do not have much storage because it last way too little at certain daily load. It's simply way to costly so far to have a nation-wide grid full of renewables, while we can make p.v. grow at small scale, for self-consumption reducing the daily load on the grid, when the grid is most charged.
As you might see from comment-less downvotes it's unpopular to state the truth. Too many do not accept a simple things: WEF and co want just power, the 99% of slaves, as any kind of nazi, they are not "liberal", they are just dictatorial, with countless of voluntary slaves who "trust their system" refusing to see the reality and scale.
An LFP car battery can last 10 years if took to 80% SOC normally, once a month or so to 100% to balance it, with let's say a charge cycle per cell per week. If you use it more it will last less. Now for homes and alike at China prices having enough storage to being able to go without the grid still powered normally from one day to another, normally using the grid a bit, discharging the battery to going not beyond a full cycle per cell per week, it's economically NOT convenient but still doable as a reasonable backup and doing so means shifting loads as much as possible ending up in grid usage when the grid is not much loaded most of the time and while consuming much more electricity (because you ditch natural gas and so on) still not straining the grid because the damn truth is that we can't go all electric tomorrow morning without this model.
Grid storage means hyper-expensive batteries with one or more full cycle per cell per day, typical lifetime 1-3 years, not more. For what? Just to allow more p.v. and eolic in the grid compensating their variability avoiding large scale blackouts. With this model on scale it would be normal to have 3€/$ per kWh as a mean price and we can't even built enough storage for the first generation.
The substantial reality is that the green new deal it's possible only in NEW buildings, where the need of energy to heat/cool is 1/7-1/10 of a "classic" building, and doable only with local energy production. This means smart cities are simply impossible to power on scale, some part of the currently populated world can be powered as well.
Starting what we can, meaning building small buildings residential and commercial, so not smart 15' cities, where anyone do it's best to be semi-autonomous not "in the sharing economy" where few giants loan anything to the 99%, while keep researching on what we can, because that's the best we can do. For the WEF green new deal of smart cities we could be perhaps around 4 billion humans on earth and no more. And that's just for a first generation.
In the west most have stopped the new deal simply because there is no way to implement it in a service model, it could only exists for individuals, so with personal ownership against the Agenda 2030. EVs sales are down because only those who can charge them at home could really enjoy them, the others who try have simply given up. p.v. investments tend to go not so well because for privates it's way too expensive because of speculation and large projects could grow a bit, but not much more without much grid instability.
If you try you can see the same problem everywhere: in Pakistan p.v. have boomed than utilities have started to complaint that people are less and less dependent on them, they arrive at imposing on-site exchange making p.v. economically useless and the energy price exploded as grid stability plummeted but they do not care. In Kazakhstan after the WEF (or Royal Dutch Shell) "liberalization" lobby push there was a full scale revolt and still they can't control energy prices and so on, we see more easily in the third world because they go much faster and unregulated than in the west, but that's where we are going, with many supporting their oppressors...
It doesn't work like that. The California failure is a good example. So far energy storage can just do a day-to-day backup for homes and some non-energy-intensive business activities, for others just few hours. No more. At grid scale storage is only a quick buffer to compensate renewables fluctuations waiting for classic power plants to regulate their output.
Even at current Chinese prices a re-backed grid is just a dream and a nightmare only those who do not know electricity could think it's doable, while it's perfectly possible converge to electricity as we have converged to IP, a single tech for nearly all, not the cheapest but the most universal, that on scale means doing more with less, or implementing the new deal, with self-consumption and small scale storage, so we can shift our loads (and we have very sensible economical incentives to do so) as much as possible augmenting the usage of electricity without augmenting the grid loads. Nights will demand more from the grid, but that's not an issue because most loads except in harsh winters that are more and more rare, happen during the day.
This is a logic, technically sound path toward the new deal. The California model is a logic, financial-capitalism sound way to implement the new deal which actually can't happen. Those who think the contrary simply do not understand the scale and the tech we have so far. We can't produce enough storage and using it for such grid-scale loads means breaking it very quickly, not 10 years of a classic LFP but 1-3 years maximum at a scale we can't sustain for more than few years with skyrocketing costs.
The giant want this because they need this to milk people as much as they can, but it's technically impossible and anyone who think the contrary will see what happen in few years if the trend will keep going like today, with more and more rolling blackouts and large stability issues to the point the EU will look like South Africa's grid now.
Do you notice anything? The records keep falling ever summer. The battery discharge per day went up by 100% in the last year.
I do not see any bending of the curve.
California is the perfect example of building enough batteries can solve the duck curve problem.
Even in Texas, with the government actively against renewables and batteries, you see record been set for battery storage all the time
https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Pow...
Texas quadruple the battery storage in the last year.
Difference between California and Texas. California is about 3 years ahead of Texas. When the economics are so much cheaper, battery power is build .
I notice the wrong focus: how much such storage cost vs how much it will been able to run? My slowly discharged home battery have a declared loos of 5% in ~3 years and I discharge only 10%/day normally. My car SOH (NMC though), if true from ODB state 10% loss over ~2 years. Compared to some friends I can esteem 2.3 years of useful life for NMC, 8 years for LFP if MODERATELY used (80-20% 3 time a week), for grid storage the useful life might be 1-3 year.
Secondary consider the battery production capacity: actually we do not recycle batteries except few experiments, too expensive to be done on scale, that still recycle only a part of lithium, most efficient recover let's say 80% from a new battery.
What do you expect in 10 years?
VS
what you expect if we re-build on scale modern small buildings where p.v. at a significant slice of latitude it's roughly 50% of total consumption in pure self-consumption? What if a modern home who consume in hot summer ~30kWh/day consume from the grid ~5kWh/day like a home with no A/C and in cold winter consume ~40kWh/day, ~30 from the grid instead of 90-100kWh of a classic one (data ranged from homes in Sweden to Spain)? Because you know the most we get so far was from consuming much less to do much more, where we are far better than generating more from renewables in improvements rate terms. You can't "improve" classic buildings, you can only rebuild them and we haven't enough natural resources to rebuild cities not counting it's practically impossible for mere impact of such megaproject on existing human life.
The reality is that only a spread society of small stuff can evolve, and in a changing world we need to been able to evolve. That's the resilience WEF talk, denying it at the same time.
A battery storage facility that has lost 30% of its capacity after 10 years of operation is still functional with that lower capacity. Compare this to something like a car that has much more limited function with a lowered capacity.