@Viking_Hippie No I’m not conflating anything, what we have NOW determines how long the grid can tolerate under production and that is about five minutes. But wind might not blow for days, the sun is on average not in the sky 12 hours out of the day and the majority of those hours it is at an angle that makes less than peak production possible. But even if we used every gram of lithium we have we couldn’t produce enough storage. There are some alternatives, vanadium flow batteries, but again vanadium is expensive and in short supply, or sodium ion batteries, here we’ve probably got adequate materials, but sodium has a two step discharge curve that make the electronics more expensive. In short we don’t PRESENTLY have enough storage and it is doubtful that we will ever have enough to last overnight.
@Viking_Hippie No I’m not conflating anything, what we have NOW determines how long the grid can tolerate under production and that is about five minutes. But wind might not blow for days, the sun is on average not in the sky 12 hours out of the day and the majority of those hours it is at an angle that makes less than peak production possible. But even if we used every gram of lithium we have we couldn’t produce enough storage. There are some alternatives, vanadium flow batteries, but again vanadium is expensive and in short supply, or sodium ion batteries, here we’ve probably got adequate materials, but sodium has a two step discharge curve that make the electronics more expensive. In short we don’t PRESENTLY have enough storage and it is doubtful that we will ever have enough to last overnight.