Costs are falling and installs are rapidly increasing? It didn't make sense to build them so far due to limited renewables on grid, you need to regularly produce (a lot) more than load. Like in CA.

And Pumped hydro is great wherever it's possible, don't see why it needs to be pitted against BESS.

The answer to this is obvious. Until very recently, solar was less than 100% of midday electricity. What would have been the point of installing batteries? To charge them with natural gas?

As you might see from comment-less downvotes it's unpopular to state the truth. Too many do not accept a simple things: WEF and co want just power, the 99% of slaves, as any kind of nazi, they are not "liberal", they are just dictatorial, with countless of voluntary slaves who "trust their system" refusing to see the reality and scale.

An LFP car battery can last 10 years if took to 80% SOC normally, once a month or so to 100% to balance it, with let's say a charge cycle per cell per week. If you use it more it will last less. Now for homes and alike at China prices having enough storage to being able to go without the grid still powered normally from one day to another, normally using the grid a bit, discharging the battery to going not beyond a full cycle per cell per week, it's economically NOT convenient but still doable as a reasonable backup and doing so means shifting loads as much as possible ending up in grid usage when the grid is not much loaded most of the time and while consuming much more electricity (because you ditch natural gas and so on) still not straining the grid because the damn truth is that we can't go all electric tomorrow morning without this model.

Grid storage means hyper-expensive batteries with one or more full cycle per cell per day, typical lifetime 1-3 years, not more. For what? Just to allow more p.v. and eolic in the grid compensating their variability avoiding large scale blackouts. With this model on scale it would be normal to have 3€/$ per kWh as a mean price and we can't even built enough storage for the first generation.

The substantial reality is that the green new deal it's possible only in NEW buildings, where the need of energy to heat/cool is 1/7-1/10 of a "classic" building, and doable only with local energy production. This means smart cities are simply impossible to power on scale, some part of the currently populated world can be powered as well.

Starting what we can, meaning building small buildings residential and commercial, so not smart 15' cities, where anyone do it's best to be semi-autonomous not "in the sharing economy" where few giants loan anything to the 99%, while keep researching on what we can, because that's the best we can do. For the WEF green new deal of smart cities we could be perhaps around 4 billion humans on earth and no more. And that's just for a first generation.

In the west most have stopped the new deal simply because there is no way to implement it in a service model, it could only exists for individuals, so with personal ownership against the Agenda 2030. EVs sales are down because only those who can charge them at home could really enjoy them, the others who try have simply given up. p.v. investments tend to go not so well because for privates it's way too expensive because of speculation and large projects could grow a bit, but not much more without much grid instability.

If you try you can see the same problem everywhere: in Pakistan p.v. have boomed than utilities have started to complaint that people are less and less dependent on them, they arrive at imposing on-site exchange making p.v. economically useless and the energy price exploded as grid stability plummeted but they do not care. In Kazakhstan after the WEF (or Royal Dutch Shell) "liberalization" lobby push there was a full scale revolt and still they can't control energy prices and so on, we see more easily in the third world because they go much faster and unregulated than in the west, but that's where we are going, with many supporting their oppressors...