It's Thursday. For years, the argument for pumped hydro was simple: batteries could not hold enough energy for long enough to matter. A fresh set of national cost numbers just retired that argument, and took the gas peaker down with it.
In today's edition:
⚡ Big Story: Australia's benchmark says the cheapest 24-hour power is now a battery
🔌 Quick Hits: NYC's billion-dollar Canadian lifeline is still dark, and France backs €63B of offshore wind
💰 Capital Stack: Utilities want $9.2B more, and Shell cashes out of Indian renewables
🏛️ Policy Watch: New York freezes big data centers while New Jersey courts new nuclear
🌟 Community Spotlight: a power-markets modeler turned the grid into a board game
But first…
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The Big Story
Batteries undercut both pumped hydro and gas peakers, CSIRO finds
Australia's benchmark electricity-cost study landed on Wednesday with a finding that reaches well beyond the country that produced it: batteries have gotten cheap enough to beat the two technologies they were long assumed to lose to. The final GenCost 2025-26 report, published jointly by the national science agency CSIRO and grid operator AEMO, found utility battery costs fell 11 to 16 percent in 2024-25 while pumped hydro costs were revised sharply upward, and that a four-hour battery system has now dropped below the capital cost of a large open-cycle gas turbine for the first time. The reason batteries keep winning is structural: they are a manufactured product that follows a learning curve, while pumped hydro is a civil-engineering build whose costs rise with every site-specific tunnel and dam.
"As battery costs continue to fall and gas technology costs rise, batteries are increasingly becoming the preferred flexible generation technology in the near term."
The report found utility battery costs fell 11 to 16 percent in 2024-25, and it classifies pumped hydro as a "mature" technology whose costs are projected to keep rising through 2055.
A four-hour battery moved below the capital cost of a large open-cycle gas turbine for the first time, as gas-turbine prices climbed for a fourth straight year on data-center-driven demand.
Batteries track a manufacturing learning curve: BloombergNEF logged global turnkey battery-system prices down 31 percent to US$117/kWh in 2025, a dynamic pumped hydro's one-off civil works cannot match.
The numbers landed a day after Queensland shelved the AU$6B Mt Rawdon pumped-hydro project in favor of the AU$18.4B Borumba scheme, which GenCost pegs at AU$383/kWh against a AU$237/kWh national benchmark.
Source: Energy-Storage.news
Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
A billion-dollar power line that will not turn back on, Europe's biggest wind bet yet, and a solar summer for the record books.
The Champlain Hudson Power Express has sat dark for more than 10 days after a fault in the US section of its buried cable, and Hydro-Québec now expects repairs to run into late July, sidelining the 1,250 MW line built to carry Québec hydropower into New York City during exactly the kind of heat wave gripping the region now. Gothamist
The European Commission approved a €63 billion French state-aid scheme to back 11 offshore wind farms totaling up to 11.1 GW through two-way contracts for difference, replacing a narrower 2025 package and covering roughly 10.6 percent of France's annual electricity demand once built. European Commission
France, Italy and Spain each set all-time daily solar-generation records during July's heat, with Spain reaching 277 GWh and France 199 GWh, according to AleaSoft, as a wall of midday solar pushed European power prices down. pv magazine
The Capital Stack
US utilities are asking to raise another $9.2 billion
Electric and gas utilities filed $9.2 billion in rate-hike requests with state regulators in the second quarter, up 26 percent from $7.3 billion a year earlier, according to a report from the advocacy group PowerLines. The requests, which could hit more than 56 million customers, are driven heavily by transmission and distribution spending to serve data-center and industrial demand: Oncor in Texas asked for the single-largest increase at $1.2 billion, tied largely to Permian Basin load, and Dominion in Virginia is seeking about $1.5 billion. The grid buildout everyone is cheering, in other words, is increasingly being financed straight off ratepayers' bills.
Source: Utility Dive
Also in the capital stack:
Shell agreed to sell its Indian renewables arm Sprng Energy to Aditya Birla for $1.8 billion, a supermajor recycling capital out of a fast-growing solar-and-storage market just as a domestic conglomerate moves to consolidate it into a roughly 9.4 GW platform. Business Standard
Policy Watch
New York became the first state to freeze new hyperscale data centers, as Governor Hochul signed Executive Order 62 on July 14 pausing state environmental permits for facilities of 50 MW or more for up to a year while the state writes a new framework, a move that puts gigawatts of planned AI load on hold in a major market. Governor's Office
New Jersey went the other direction on generation, as Governor Sherrill signed the Power NJ Act on July 13 launching a competitive procurement of at least 1,100 MW of new nuclear capacity with ratepayer safeguards, and directing the state to issue a solicitation by March 2027. New Jersey Monitor
Grid Hub Community Spotlight
A power-markets modeler turned interconnection queues into a board game
Anshul Saxena spent years modeling congestion, interconnection queues, PPAs, and capacity expansion, then rebuilt all of it as a game called VIRYA: The Datacenter Economy Game. The premise is Monopoly-meets-Catan on the power grid: you build a national economy anchored by a hyperscale data center, and the rules mirror how grids actually work. Plants earn nothing until you buy them a transmission line (solar, wind, gas, nuclear, or batteries, no wires, no revenue), behind-the-meter fuel cells skip the queue at roughly double the cost per MW, and mid-game grid events like heat waves, duck curves, and winter storms reward whoever planned for flexibility. You win by completing a fully developed economy with a connected data center and 300 MW online, or by topping the development-points board when the 40-card trade deck runs out. It is free to play in the browser on desktop or phone.
If you work in energy, Anshul would genuinely love your take. Play it at anshulsaxena.com and see the launch on LinkedIn.
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