According to a Wood Mackenzie report covered by TechCrunch, four-hour battery storage is now less expensive than open-cycle gas turbines in every one of the 43 markets surveyed across all continents. The consultancy expects battery electricity costs to keep falling while gas turbine costs rise in the coming decades, a trend it calls "decisive and widening."
The price gap is driven partly by surging demand from AI data centers, which have been buying up available gas turbines and pushing procurement wait times to two to four years for open-cycle models and into the early 2030s for closed-cycle ones. That has raised costs for utilities that rely on open-cycle turbines as peaking plants, making batteries an increasingly attractive alternative.
Solar remains the cheapest form of new power in every market, but North American solar faces near-term pressure from tariffs and import restrictions. Wood Mackenzie notes that 168 gigawatts of utility-scale solar is shielded from those shocks through safe-harbor provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill, which preserves tax credits for projects started or completed before the end of 2027.
Regional differences are stark: in the Middle East and Africa, four-hour batteries are projected to be 33% cheaper by 2035, displacing gas peaking on cost across every gas market in the region, while China's energy storage costs already sit 55% below its neighbors'. The report lands as rising electricity prices and data center demand continue to strain grids, giving developers and utilities a cheaper, faster-to-deploy alternative to gas turbines.