Renewable Grid Storage

I'd venture a guess that solar/wind/storage would have significant gaps in availability in this scenario. The economics of battery storage solutions scales really badly as the length of the gaps they need to fill increases. Not only does the capital cost of batteries increase in proportion to the runtime required, the utilization plummets due to longer gaps being less common and predictable than shorter ones. I can easily see it becoming uneconomical to provide a reliable e

Yes this is because there isn't enough grid storage yet. Massive amounts of stationary storage need to be produced whether that be pumped hydro or lithium ion battery or some other means of energy storage.

You're assuming "batteries" which is just wrong. There are a lot of economical grid-scale power storage systems. Batteries are low-latency storage used to stabilize load - they are expensive because they are so quick to change the power they provide. Frequency, voltage, current, whatever you need a battery can provide in milliseconds. But you don't want to run it for days.If you want to store power overnight you want kinetic storage, or possibly power to gas. There are lot

Why is using stored renewable energy (e.g., chemical, physical) not an option?

The tech is not here. The scale of grid storage required to fulfill just diurnal storage - let alone days or weeks to offset seasonal variation - is far beyond what batteries can provide. To put this in perspective, the US alone uses 12 TWh of electricity per day. The world uses 60 TWh per day. Both of these figures are going to increase, as poorer countries develop and want amenities like air conditioning. Also, as transportation and industrial processes are electrified. By comparison, g

That's why we have grids and storage. Perhaps you should investigate those before making definitive statements about what renewables can and can't do.

Hydropower storage is geographically limited. Chemical storage is not available at the scale required. Plus most batteries produced are going to EVs. Remember, the world uses ~60 TWh of energy per day. And it's not not the day and night cycle that needs to be smoothed out, it's also seasonal fluctuations that can last for weeks.All the other options haven't been built at scale. Hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air have all been suggested, but aren't deployed w

What about using this for grid scale energy storage ?

For thermodynamic efficiency, yes, batteries are better. But they're not available at anywhere near the levels required. The global battery production capacity is at just under 300GWh per year. By comparison, the US's night-time energy consumption is ~4-5TWh. Even if we stopped producing electronics, electric cars, any any other battery product and directed the entirety of the global battery production supply to grid storage, it'd still take the US over a decade at the current pro

There's no viable way to build storage at the scale required to run a wind and solar grid. Even building just 1 hour of electricity storage amounts to 2,500 GWh. The entire world's annual output of battery storage is somewhere between 300 and 400 GWh. Any attempt at grid scale storage would lead to shortages driving up prices.Similar bottlenecks occur with pumped hydroelectricity. To build it economically you not only need an alpine lake handy, it also needs to be close to transport