alt Hacker NewsMore stoked for when the same is said for storage.
Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler
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13kW on the roof and a 48kW battery. It produces on cloudy days, and battery alone can last 3-4 days with regular unmoderated use with 6 adults at home. That includes split system air-conditioners on eco mode.
It produces enough on cloudy days to still.top the batteries up to full.
I had a day recently where production topped 80kW and was exporting bulk before late afternoon grid production limiting kicked in. That's a lot of juice, and Ive basically not touched the grid in 7 months.
Usually solar and storage are a package deal these days for grid scale solutions. Mostly, storage is not really about providing long term storage but short term. It used to be that the sweet spot that makes the most economic sense was something like 2 or 4 hours of power (relative to the maximum output of the solar panels) but these days batteries are a lot cheaper and 8 hours or more is becoming fairly common. The point of storage is not really to cover for all the downtime when the sun doesn't shine but to give grid operators enough lead time to bring online extra generation or buy capacity on the open market and adjust their planning. Mostly a few hours is all they need to ensure the grid stays up and running through daily peak usage windows.
In aggregate, grid operators have a lot of other tools at their disposal via flexible pricing, flexible demand, and automated systems that can adapt to this to e.g. charge cars when there is a surplus of energy, turn on/off water boilers, etc. There's a lot of innovation around this topic in this space. This by the way is as much as making sure generated power doesn't go to waste than it is about ensuring there is enough power. They use batteries to time shift excess power to when they can utilize it.
Interconnected grids means that e.g. an operator in Denmark can import/export to and from the UK, Norway, Germany, etc. On a windy day they'll be exporting wind power. On a sunny day, they might add some solar to that mix. When there's no wind or sun in Denmark, they might pull in Scottish/German wind, Norwegian hydro, Swedish nuclear, etc. Batteries are being deployed all over the place at a pace that is only exceeded by the pace at which solar is being deployed. Whenever there's a surplus energy, batteries get charged up. It's very rare for all of the available generation to disappear all at the same time for long enough to drain all the batteries. And for those times of course fossil generation is still a thing as well, and will be for decades to come. There are a lot of gas based plants throughout Europe. As well as some nuclear plants of course. Singling out the EU market here but it's going to be similar elsewhere.
The point here is that there's no need to pair solar setups with days/weeks/months worth of storage. A few hours goes a long way.
Good news: batteries on are a similar exponential curve. Just a decade or so behind.
Diurnal storage is solved by batteries. Longer term storage will very likely be solved. For several days, cheaper batteries (perhaps with lower specific power). For longer periods, either thermal storage or e-fuels.
Won't be long, battery installation is bigger by GW than wing or gas:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
But for the most part it will trail solar, because the first chunk of the solar doesn't really need storage. But once there's a healthy percentage of solar, all new solar will have storage or it won't get paid.
This is solvable, but it will require international cooperation on a scale that is unlikely. But you wouldn't need any storage at all, just a large number of long distance HVDC lines to move the energy from wherever the sun is shining to where it isn't.
Aren’t lead acid batteries great for this purpose? They have advantage over lithium in stationary setups because weight is not an issue and they can be “daisy chained” many many times. I’m unaware of more cutting edge alternatives and the way the electrical companies handle solar is confusing IME
We can simulate storage with overcapacity and broader geographical distribution networks, even if storage doesn’t become as cheap.
Fortunately that doesn’t seem like it will be an issue since battery storage costs are also seeing an exponential reduction.
Electricity is cheaper at night but only 20% of my consumption is at night, so I wouldn't mind if the situation was reversed.
I guess using electricity to heat during the night could be an issue, but we could also accept to let the temperature drop.
Batteries already kill peaker plants as a grid-scale battery that lasts 4 hours became cheaper than running natural gas turbine to cover the evening demand peak.
The cheaper solar gets the more of a gold rush there has been to develop projects/technologies that take advantage.
Its also tricky to defend in war prone locations.
I think solar is amazing and we need more of it - but I can't stand this solar and storage go at it alone mentality. It's pretty thickheaded to discount the other forms of energy that we can use and will need.
> More stoked for when the same is said for storage
Batteries have use in war and power. It will likely scale faster than PV. What we need is the second derivative, so production of the latter can be turbocharged just before battery production is about to break through.
It's encouraging- when one part improves usually the others follow.
Most of our chemistries are targeting things like cars and consumer electronics.
Ideally we see people like Form Energies, using iron-air (rust) batteries, for much easier to scale storage. https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/06/1145020/2026-cli...
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...
- Battery energy storage has grown at an exceptional pace, with global installations increasing more than 20-fold in storage capacity over the past five years. This growth has been driven by falling battery prices, abundant supply and relatively short project lead times. As variable renewable generation expands in many markets, battery storage is becoming an important source of flexibility and resilience for power systems, while also representing a growing commercial opportunity for battery manufacturers.
- However, more than 90% of battery storage applications rely on LFP batteries that are almost exclusively supplied from China, which accounts for almost all global manufacturing capacity and the associated technical expertise. Korean producers are investing to scale up LFP battery production that can offer an alternative, but they face intense competition from established, lower-cost Chinese producers in an oversupplied market.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/battery-storage-is-scaling-...
- Battery storage now accounts for around 18% of installed dispatchable capacity in Australia, compared with 7% in China, 5% in the United States and 4% in Europe – underlining how rapidly batteries are becoming an important part of the electricity systems in some regions.
https://www.ess-news.com/2026/06/02/global-battery-additions...
Battery storage is right behind the solar adoption curve. Net zero in five years? Probably not. Ten to fifteen years? Almost assured considering rate of change and the overall economics (assuming ~1TW/year of solar PV deployment and enough battery storage to soak up that low carbon generation while also providing grid services to replace thermal generation grid support [voltage, frequency, etc]).
(China is curtailing renewables equal to the annual combined generation of Spain and the Philippines every six months, and India about ~100-120GW/month due to not enough battery storage, for example)
> Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler
The fun part is that we're still well before the point when this even matters.
Almost 60% of the US grid is still fossil fuels, with around half of that still happening during the day. Which means you can get down to ~30% fossil fuels without any storage at all because all you do is go from burning fossil fuels during the day and at night to burning fossil fuels only at night.