I was talking with someone who runs a large wind power company. I'd assumed that the best place for storage was close to the consumers, but what I'd missed is

I was talking with someone who runs a large wind power company. I'd assumed that the best place for storage was close to the consumers, but what I'd missed is that the grid itself is often the limiting factor. If you put batteries near the consumer and charge them when wind is cheap, you need twice the grid capacity. If you put batteries close to or inside the wind turbines, you can charge them when you've excess wind, and discharge when wind is lower, but you can get by with a lot less grid capacity because you don't need to tranmit the generation peaks over it.