I read back through this thread and others like it and I see a lot of extreme views projected onto environmentally-minded folk by some of the more outspoken rightwingers... but not so many actually coming from us.
Anyway, on to the main point of your comment: once they take off, these things have a habit of progressing much faster than you'd expect. Yes, it's taken decades to get to the point where lithium batteries can store one minute of world demand, but it won't take anywhere near that long for the next minute. Just Tesla's gigafactory alone will be producing enough batteries each year to store about 40 seconds of world demand, and it's just one of at least half a dozen recently announced factories of similar scale. And that's just lithium. Many other companies including (shameless plug) RFX are rapidly gearing up to expand into this enormous market. Soon we'll be adding 1 minute per year, then 5, then 10, then 30...
I'm a bit confused why you seem to think we'd need an entire year's worth of storage for it to be worthwhile. Even a few hours will support massive change in terms of baseload use of wind and solar, and a few days will be enough for just about any eventuality. If we take it seriously, that's barely two decades away. If we drag our feet, perhaps three. Either way, it's pretty much inevitable - and the great thing about it is that given the fine-grained modularity of solar, wind and storage the transition can be very, very smooth (if we allow it to be).
