Never is a long time. There hasn’t really been any demand for a chemical battery capable of large scale storage with frequent drain-recharge cycles. That is unt

Never is a long time. There hasn’t really been any demand for a chemical battery capable of large scale storage with frequent drain-recharge cycles. That is until we build out large scale renewable power plants. So if somebody has ever invented a cheap chemical battery that fulfills grid needs, that invention was ahead of its time and has been lost in obscurity. So even if pumped hydro remains our best technology for large scale storage at the moment, I still remain optimistic that in a decade we will have market ready chemical batteries that rivals pumped hydro in places where geography does not favor the latter. I’m particularly looking at molten salt (or liquid metal) batteries here, with some storage facilities being under construction already.