>Because feeding back to the grid is only a sustainable solution when a minimal number of entities are doing it. What happens when the majority of entities are feeding back to the grid? Where is all that energy supposed to go? The answer, of course, is storage.
I was talking about solar and it's benefits at shaving peak demand. I'm not talking about moving all of our power generation to solar and storing it in batteries. That would be silly. However, that you mention the huge slack in power demand at night helps illustrate my point. Solar matches up quite well with our needs for when electricity is consumed. No, the sun doesn't always shine, but yes, it can be a great tool in managing our power needs.
See the post you replied to--I'm not one that thinks all of our power should be coming from renewables at this point--but we could use a lot more solar (and also other renewables in different scales) than we already do. Is Germany's grid in shambles because they use so much solar? Are they doing widescale battery storage of extra energy? Of course not.
If there does end up being some sort of HUGE central energy storage happening, I doubt it would be in batteries. Talk about being difficult/expensive to scale...
>If there does end up being some sort of HUGE central energy storage happening, I doubt it would be in batteries. Talk about being difficult/expensive to scale...
Why would it be difficult/expensive to scale? As long as battery costs go down, there's absolutely no issue scaling. You just put as many of them as you want together.
I was talking about solar and it's benefits at shaving peak demand. I'm not talking about moving all of our power generation to solar and storing it in batteries. That would be silly. However, that you mention the huge slack in power demand at night helps illustrate my point. Solar matches up quite well with our needs for when electricity is consumed. No, the sun doesn't always shine, but yes, it can be a great tool in managing our power needs.
See the post you replied to--I'm not one that thinks all of our power should be coming from renewables at this point--but we could use a lot more solar (and also other renewables in different scales) than we already do. Is Germany's grid in shambles because they use so much solar? Are they doing widescale battery storage of extra energy? Of course not.
If there does end up being some sort of HUGE central energy storage happening, I doubt it would be in batteries. Talk about being difficult/expensive to scale...