I doubt chemical batteries will ever be cheap enough for grid scale power. There are other cheaper forms of energy storage that work better in bulk. Batteries are mainly useful for being self-contained and dense. Neither of these are hard requirements for fixed grid-scale installations. Pumped storage is pretty cheap already in the geographies where it works, and geothermal storage has a lot of interest and potential at the moment.
Never is a long time. There hasn’t really been any demand for a chemical battery capable of large scale storage with frequent drain-recharge cycles. That is until we build out large scale renewable power plants. So if somebody has ever invented a cheap chemical battery that fulfills grid needs, that invention was ahead of its time and has been lost in obscurity.
So even if pumped hydro remains our best technology for large scale storage at the moment, I still remain optimistic that in a decade we will have market ready chemical batteries that rivals pumped hydro in places where geography does not favor the latter. I’m particularly looking at molten salt (or liquid metal) batteries here, with some storage facilities being under construction already.
Yeah, it can store 120 megawatt hours of power, which is pretty big, but the largest pumped storage battery in the US stores 24,000 megawatt hours of power and started operation 36 years ago.
