The math says different yes the upfront costs and emissions must be amortized over decades and will produce very low cost and nearly carbon free power. The enemy is combustion with the exception of hydrogen.
Again, this is not about primary production during the day, but energy storage for renewables. Hydrogen is a nightmare to store and move. Add some carbon atoms onto it and suddenly you have a useful high-density energy storage solution. The problem with traditional combustion is the constant extraction of new raw material and disregard for externalities in it's combustion. If you are mostly reusing the same material and capturing the by-product so the externalities are managed, it's no where near as bad.
I don't think you fully understand the math involved here, concrete comes with a high cost.
Consider the following:
Hover Dam
6.6 million tons of concrete
~900kg CO2 per ton of concrete (maybe, I'm not digging into the tonne vs ton vs historical tonnage units)
~5.94e9 tons of C02 produced to build
~248 square miles flooded
2,074 MW peak production
Track 4A Power Plant
???? tons of C02 produced to build, guestimate 2-3 magnitudes less
~4 square mile facility
1440 MW
Even with a 30% penalty to run the petro-generators clean, you could build several of them and come out ahead. You can also build them almost anywhere, they are not reliant on water as we slide into the water wars, etc
To whatever extent solar or wind is usable, carbon emissions will be irrelevant if those are cheaper. Any ecological benefits will be icing on the cake and the cherry on top.
Sure, but I'm talking about short term/longer term energy storage for solar and wind. Nothing is going to beat tapping the fusion generator in space (0 maintenance
) or the planetary currents (air currents, river/ocean currents, geothermal, etc).
Is there a reason not to install battery stations of one sort or other at closing, or recently closed, fossil powered generating stations? They're usually relatively secluded brown field industrial sites with good connections to the power grid.
There aren't good ones, at least if you're talking about future plans. Sometimes the sites need to be cleaned first, so it's easier to just find another location, but most of the time it's that the cost of building batteries large enough to sustain a grid is still very high and politically it's hard enough to get new power generation going, let alone unsexy things like power storage or redundancies. It's also a balancing act, the time it takes to decommision an already running plant and re-purpose it leaves you with even less leeway for demand off-hours. If we had a strong nuclear core it would be a lot easier...