And that's why large scale is so important. If we'd been working on it a decade earlier with scale, we might have industrial sized flow batteries available now.
Flow batteries have been around for quite a while. Pumped hydro, gravity energy storage etc has also been around for a long time. If we'd progressed that more in the last decade we wouldn't have to curtail the renewables we have now. Now, thanks to vested interests opposing change, we are playing catch up.
With large scale storage , peaks disappear. All the problems of the existing system will go away. Because we have a system that where power has to be used as it is generated, it has it's limits. That's why we end up with peak demand periods, shortages and unreliability. A system that can time shift power generation is ultimately more flexible . A system that reacts in milliseconds rather than seconds or minutes is much more reliable
Our old system has served us well for a century or so however, just like any other old technology, it can be improved to be be better, more reliable and cheaper.
