Storage is much less of a problem than it’s made out to be. The studies which find it to be insurmountable and expensive make a bunch of false and limiting assumptions about geographic scale often to areas the size of single, not very large US states. As a result, they find that there’s inadequate supply of electricity at all hours of day.
The reality is that continent-scale grids already exist and are being improved, especially with HVDC, allowing more electricity to flow from more places. Offshore wind farms use HVDC to ship wind to market, and it’s being built to bring northern Canadian hydro to the USA in greater amounts.
And just as gas and coal generation were overbuilt, wind and solar will be overbuilt, but they are a lot cheaper.
So we’ll have lots of wind and solar in continent scale areas with all the existing hydro. Storage is much less of a concern under this model. It still exists.
Which is why it’s nice to know that we will have 20 TWh of batteries in EVs in the USA alone by 2050, and that there are 100x more pumped hydro sites close to transmission today than are required for all of our future storage needs.
