Solar farms still require traditional gas, coal or nuclear plants to provide idle power. Except for certain regions, you can't have consistent solar, and you need to have backup power for brownouts.
The idea with better batteries is that solar stations could provide their own excess capacity storage.
But battery tech is still not good enough for large scale storage. The break down chemically and are not easy to refurbish. The only real "battery" that sorta works is the Racoon Mountain hydro station, which uses extra electricity to pump water into a resistor and then drains it for power during high peaks.
We should be building these all over the country, but they don't really provide that much capacity; plus you kinda destroy the environment around an entire hill and have to build it back up afterwards (Racoon Mtn does have really good mountain biking trails now).
But this is just more fluff to green wash technology that really cannot ever truly replace hydrocarbons. We really need to minimize and reduce energy consumption. That's probably never going to happen.
They do. But as some people keep complaining, not at night. This can shift the output of a solar farm to when it’s dark.
It might not be literal truth, but it’s close enough to be understood — like saying “this food comes from a supermarket” even though the food actually comes from five different farms in different countries.
