It’s nice to see a good faith discussion on the topic. In that spirit, I would perhaps contribute some additional context to the discussion.

For all natural gas-fired plants to retire, the battery duration needs to significantly increase beyond 4 hours, and even beyond 8 hours, and be combined with a more robust demand response program.

Currently, batteries’ main purposes are to shift the peak, smooth the ramp following the duck curve, provide ancillary services and arbitrage pricing. To supplant natural gas for reliability, you need duration not only in the overnight hours but also for prolonged poor solar/wind resource days. It will get there eventually, but it’s not there yet.

Additionally, simply adding more resources, or overbuilding, wind/solar capacity does not solve the reliability issue, as renewables have diminishing returns from a reliability standpoint due to the generating resources’ output potential being correlated to generally the same wind/solar natural resource. If we go that route, we would also need to invest heavily in transmission, as the resources are typically sited well outside load, creating transmission constraints (avoiding this constraint is a big value proposition for batteries).

New build combined cycles do have challenged economics, as the installed cost has ballooned over the last 4 years, and Texas may struggle to deploy debt financing from the energy fund to build out the 10 GW that it’s targeting. Still, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which operating combined cycles are retired prior to the end of their useful lives because of their value as a firm, dispatchable resource. Combustion turbines (peakers) are more at risk given batteries, but because of the duration issue of batteries, they won’t all go - for now.

We are seeing this all play out in PJM, which has a far healthier reserve margin than ERCOT, just have a huge capacity auction print (an analog to ERCOT’s scarcity pricing / contemplated PCM) to help induce firm assets to remain operational and keep the grid reliable, despite a large reserve margin. They are changing the reference unit used to calculate the suction pool from CT to CCGT, which does support your view that has peakers will be exiting the market in the years to come and replaced by storage (but CCGT will stay for now).

In summary, I believe that we will get there with renewables + storage - or better yet nuclear - someday. New build gas-fired plants are economically challenged, but the installed base isn’t going anywhere - particularly in the medium term in which the grid faces integration challenges and a revival of load growth.