Battery Storage for Grid Backup: Better Keep Working on It.

Advocates of generating electricity mostly with intermittent wind and sun, when challenged on how they would deal with a calm night, are always ready with the obvious answer: energy storage. - Watts Up With That? - Francis Menton

•  Just get some batteries, store up excess power from the windy mid-days, discharge as needed, and everything will work out.

Unfortunately, the advocates never acknowledge that the problem of making an electrical grid work 24/7/365 with mostly wind and solar generation is much more difficult than just storing power from the day to discharge that night...

• Meanwhile, naive politicians (those in New York being Exhibit A) regularly get duped into buying a few hours or tens of hours worth of batteries for grid backup, spending billions of dollars on amounts of storage that will be almost useless for backing up a primarily wind/sun grid...

The fact that a group of generators can produce the same number of MWhs of energy in a year as the average amount demanded means little unless the energy can be matched minute by minute to the demand...