In news that will surprise absolutely no one who has been paying attention to the plummeting cost of lithium-ion batteries, a new report from Wood Mackenzie confirms that battery storage is now cheaper than the open-cycle gas turbines that many data center developers have been gobbling up like they're going out of style. Which, spoiler alert, they are.

Across every continent and in each of the 43 markets surveyed, four-hour duration batteries undercut open-cycle gas turbines on price. Wood Mackenzie predicts the cost of electricity from batteries will keep falling, while electrons from gas turbines will only get more expensive in the coming decades. It's almost as if the laws of thermodynamics and economics are finally on speaking terms.

The report arrives as energy prices in the U.S. and elsewhere continue to rise, fueling inflation while data centers push electricity demand to new heights. Gas turbine prices have been driven up by AI data center developers, who have been buying any model they can get their hands on - like panic-buying toilet paper, but for megawatts. The effects are more acute for open-cycle gas turbines, which are more readily available but less efficient and more expensive to operate. Those turbines are often used by utilities as peaking power plants, stepping in when demand spikes. As prices for those turbines rise, it raises costs for utilities, too. So, good news for everyone except, well, everyone.

Open-cycle turbines are simpler to make than closed-cycle turbines, but even they now take two to four years to procure. Waitlists for closed-cycle turbines extend into the early 2030s. Both backlogs have been spiking prices for all new natural gas power plants. It's a supply chain crunch that makes the queue for a new iPhone look like a express lane.

Solar, meanwhile, is now the cheapest form of new power in every market in Wood Mackenzie's survey. While solar remains cheapest even in North America, the situation there is complicated. Solar prices are "under pressure" from tariffs and import restrictions, according to Wood Mackenzie, though utility-scale solar is expected to fare better. There, 168 gigawatts is largely protected from those near-term price shocks thanks to safe-harbor provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill, which kept tax credits for projects that have begun construction or are completed before the end of 2027. So, a rare case of legislation actually doing something useful.

The market for U.S. natural gas will narrow in the coming decade. In the Middle East and Africa, four-hour batteries will be 33% cheaper by 2035, "displacing gas peaking on cost across every gas market in the region." In China, energy storage costs are 55% below its neighbors'. "This economic shift is decisive and widening," Ahmed Jameel Abdullah, principal analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a press release. Translation: gas peakers, your days are numbered.