There's real long-duration energy storage now. Can it find a market?

We need very large (multi-gigawatt-hour) storage for big cities and megacities, but so far the only viable option to serve them is pumped hydro storage (PHS): it uses cheaper nighttime electricity to pump water from a low-lying reservoir to high-lying storage, and its discharge provides instantly available generation.[76] With renewably generated e

It would be a lot easier to expand our use of solar and wind energy if we had better ways to store the large quantities of electricity we’d need to cover gaps in the flow of that energy.

As challenging as such arrangements are, they rely on technically mature (and still improving) solutions—that is, on more efficient PV cells, large onshore and offshore wind turbines, and high-voltage (including long-distance direct current) transmission. If costs, permitting processes, and not-in-my-backyard sentiments were no obstacles, these tec

In large, populous nations, the complete reliance on these renewables would require what we are still missing: either mass-scale, long-term (days to weeks) electricity storage that would back up intermittent electricity generation, or extensive grids of high-voltage lines to transmit electricity across time zones and from sunny and windy regions to

It’s extremely difficult and expensive to store electricity on a large scale, but that’s one of the things we’ll need to do if we’re going to rely on intermittent sources to provide a significant percentage of clean electricity in the coming years.