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What’s so important about ease of storage? You worried the solar + battery grid will suddenly fail? You know what else connects to the grid? Renewables and sto

• amluto 2y ago
  The grid needs several nines of reliability even on that cold night, and more nines are needed in places where extreme cold weather happens and people use electric heat. To achieve any reliability at all, there needs to be enough capacity for these extreme temperature events. With heat pumps, on a cold night, 3-4x normal usage from all the heat pumps is possible, even likely. Maybe worse in places that get really cold and push the limits of the heat pumps (where COP can get quite close to 1). So the grid needs overprovisioned capacity. One could hook up a lot of renewables, a lot of storage and a lot of inverter capacity to that storage, which is expensive. But this is expensive: batteries are approaching reasonable prices if the get used heavily, but there aren’t extra-cheap batteries for systems that only get used on rare occasions. But there are extra cheap power plants that make economic sense even if rarely used: these are peaker plants. Yes, it would be nice to have a non-emitting peaker plant, and someone will surely figure this out eventually. But it wouldn’t be shocking if the eventual solution is an ordinary methane-fired plant (or maybe methanol?) where the fuel is synthetic. After all, even with renewable sources, if you actually want to store a whole lot of energy, chemical storage is pretty effective.