It's still expensive relative to batteries. If you think about it, a steam turbine has a lot of water that needs to be heated before you actually get any steam and a lot of heavy, moving parts that need to start spinning. Once all that is up and running it's fine and you just expend fuel to maintain the steam pressure.
But this takes a while. And to heat things up faster, you simply burn a massive amount of fuel; which is costly. And until you generate steam, it's not actually generating any power whatsoever.
Any thermal plant has this overhead that makes starting them expensive and stopping them undesirable because the shorter you run them, the more inefficient they get. You amortize the startup cost over the runtime. The longer it runs, the better it gets.
A battery provides power within milliseconds and it can switch from charging to discharging on a moment's notice as well. That's why batteries are displacing gas plants as peaker plants in a lot of places.
Pumped water storage or hydroplant can go from zero to 100 within tens of seconds. No degradation in storage capacity. Also greener than digging up all these rare earth metals although it still has an initial impact on the local eco system when you store water where it previously wasn't.
But this takes a while. And to heat things up faster, you simply burn a massive amount of fuel; which is costly. And until you generate steam, it's not actually generating any power whatsoever.
Any thermal plant has this overhead that makes starting them expensive and stopping them undesirable because the shorter you run them, the more inefficient they get. You amortize the startup cost over the runtime. The longer it runs, the better it gets.
A battery provides power within milliseconds and it can switch from charging to discharging on a moment's notice as well. That's why batteries are displacing gas plants as peaker plants in a lot of places.