Form Energy gets its first grid-scale battery installation

No, I do not believe I claimed that here. This started with me asking for what physical limit existed for energy storage, a question that you still have not answered. That said, I do believe that a 100% renewable grid AND 100% renewable energy usage is possible, based on the modeling scenarios that have been provided to match renewable production, battery storage, thermal storage, to the seasons and years of recorded weather patterns. So when you say "physics" is the problem but seemingly are unaware of a vast body of academic work that goes counter to your claim, I'm a bit skeptical that you've investigated much here.

>Electricity is around 20% of the total energy consumption.

Not sure what your point is here, but I will take it as an opportunity to point out that electrification of non-electrified energy uses typically requires several factors less energy. The majority of energy "use" is actually energy waste:

https://flowcharts.llnl.gov

Nonetheless, electrification of other sectors presents a huge opportunity for expansion of utilities, and their leadership has been foolish not to pursue this. I see them spouting many of the same falsehoods that you do, so perhaps they have just buried their head in the sand. Since utilities are not a free market, they can get away with doing whatever the hell they want, unfortunately.

> The limitation is storing enough energy at a small enough area with enough distribution.

Thank you for finally at least describing things in physical terms, but this does not imply that current energy densities are an issue with storage, unless you put some rough bounds on "enough energy." Even then, I suspect cost will be an issue FAR before any sort of physical limitation.

>We aren't seeing any mass adoption

Because of costs. And because of regulatory issues. And because of inertia. But for somebody to be "wrong" on this they'd have to claim mass adoption. I don't know of anybody who claimed mass adoption, just drastically falling prices, which has occurred.

New discoveries are not required, just falling costs. As the rather silly article that you link first states:

> But, besides being extremely costly in their current form, the required number of batteries needed to back up intermittent renewables would be astronomical as the above citation for New York City attests

>> “A new battery for a full-size car stores 1 kWh. Running New York City for two cloudy, windless days would require about 530 million such batteries, about 62 per person…”

They are talking about lead acid car batteries here! Not even a Leaf battery! This is, well, to put it kindly, a strawman. This sort of low-quality thought is endemic to the criticism of renewables, because to get a really solid-sounding criticism you have to make up odd scenarios like that.

So lets look at your second article, a much discussed opinion piece, that kind of rests on this part here:

>At current prices, a battery storage system of that size would cost more than $2.5 trillion.

Using "current costs," something that nobody is proposing to do. Also, no comparison for what the cost of the alternative would be, so it's just a big scary number floated as if it were an impossibility just because it's big. If we were to rebuild our current energy infrastructure from scratch, how much would it cost? Certainly far far more than $2.5T. And how much would it cost to build 12 hours worth of energy storage? Certainly far far less than $2.5T. So it's a long opinion piece built just to rile up emotions, with a veneer of quantitative thinking to let people cover up emotional validation of their prior-beliefs with what they think sound like real analysis.

And I remind you again, the complaint in this article isn't a physical impossibility, it isn't energy density, it's cost. The costs are real and high, currently, but that Technology Review piece does not take a full and honest look at them.

We don't know what the future looks like for sure, but batteries will almost certainly be a part of it. If we transition to electric cars from gasoline, most people will have 24-96 hours of energy stored in their garage (because electric cars have a few orders of magnitude more storage than the lead-acid batteries of your first article.) If we allowed people to isalnd their homes from the grid and power them with their EV batteries (something Nissan has been talking about), we'd have TREMENDOUS energy security for everybody, and would almost never have to worry about grid reliability.

The amount of storage in Tesla vehicles shows that, if we are able to build enough batteries for everybody's car transporation, we've already solved the storage problem for residential energy usage. There are still big problems on how to electrify a lot of industry, and air travel, and shipping. But if you're bullish on thorium or fusion, energy sources that are touted for their electricity generation, then you should be equally bullish on renewables and storage being able to do the same.