Well, there’s obviously going to be a lot of angles to that question but initial cost and the fact that large scale battery farms aren’t necessarily needed right now stick out to me.

The grid as it is designed right now is capable of producing power at demand simply by spinning up more generators. There’s no cost benefit (really) to generating extra power and dealing with logistics of storage while the extra power is not needed. Not at statewide scale and while the infrastructure isn’t built already.

Let’s for a second assume that a power company at statewide scale wasn’t able to just spin up more generators to meet demand and there IS incentive to provide storage. The company looking at the market today has 2 choices. Buy batteries that provide a versatile/portable solution with no real local consequence OR spend money developing and engineering molten salt or pumped water storage.

Electrochemical batteries:

• Pros: rapid installation, available market for part replacement, resellable, cheap to repair, energy dense, variable discharge, no significant R&D, negligible local environmental concerns
• Cons: less reliability, finite resource reliance (rare earths) can cause repair and replacement costs to increase, global environmental concerns, local weather systems can more easily damage infrastructure, limited cycles

Gravity and thermal batteries:

• Pros: renewable or abundant recourses depending on location, reliable and simple, efficiency increases with scale, difficult to damage irreparably, fewer global environment concerns
• Cons: large amount of R&D financial cost/time to account for local environmental concerns, construction and implementation could take multiple years in addition to R&D, unique systems don’t allow for much resell ability, larger potential footprint, location constrained, semi-fixed discharge rate, fewer partner companies to provide unique part replacement options, potential impact to local families in the event of failure (Taum Sauk).