The sizing of batteries and power sources is highly region specific, and the places where it makes sense today with current manufacturing capacity, don't have to be "everywhere" for it to be fine where it's actually done; and given the roll out rate of renewables, we also don't need to wait until battery output per year can totally displace the existing and currently running gas plants, just back up the newly installed renewables themselves - 4h in this case is how fast the PV farm would recharge those batteries in the best case, the average output of a PV plant is about 10% of the peak, so this is really a 40 hour battery pack not a 4 hour pack.
A realistic answer would need me to spend at least a month dealing with finding historical satellite cloud cover data, wind records, correlations leading to nationwide dunkelflaute, the planning options for where new stuff can be built, etc.
And even then, that varies depending on international grid connections, and how much storage is on the grid.
https://www.energymonitor.ai/power/live-eu-electricity-gener...
> New solar/wind will not be able to sell energy at negative prices unless they get subsidies.
They already do, in good weather.
> 20bn/yr for price subsidies and their grid is far from overcapacity
And how much of that was for a guaranteed price made way back when the stuff was still expensive?
New PV is, by itself, the single cheapest source of electricity; even adding on batteries only takes it up to somewhere between gas and nuclear depending on the specifics.
> and that doesn't account for other subsidy types like for transmission for renewables
How's that a subsidy? I've not seen the breakdown of bill costs here, but back in the UK there was a split between connection cost and use cost.
> They already do, in good weather.
We haven't reached yet such renewable market penetration to get this problem. It'll happen when a lot of days, 10 day hours will be covered by renewable output.
> And how much of that was for a guaranteed price made way back when the stuff was still expensive?
I have no idea how are these are distributed. Do you have a link for recent vs old projects?
https://www.energy-storage.news/arizonas-biggest-battery-sto... (“Arizona’s biggest battery storage system goes online to feed Meta data centre demand”)
https://orsted.com/en/media/news/2024/10/orsted-has-complete... (“With a 300 MW solar PV capacity, Ørsted’s Eleven Mile Solar Center will produce enough renewable energy to power 65,000 US homes while the battery can store 1200 MWh of power.”)
(~2 years from planning to commissioning)