The Energy Storage Fiasco – How Soon Will It Be Abandoned?

Lithium batteries are not the only storage. Flow batteries have higher physical land space requirements but are within limits "trivial" to scale for Wh duration: it's add more tanks. The surface of membrane across which you do the flow determines the current, capacity is liquid storage volumes. This is ideal for utility scale distribution.

Non-electrochemical methods of storage are also possible and viable at scale, the classic one being pumped hydro. They have loss levels, so are not "free" in terms of the energy inputs let alone capex to construct, but the point here is not really "oh we lost storing, lets not do this" the point is "what capacity, for what GWh, for what duration in storage" and they'd work fine.

I don't want to be the contrarian to the contrarian, but this is basically a rant against storage which attacks one form of storage: the one which people focus on because its available in volume right now. However, other places in the US grid are exploring flow batteries, Pumped Hydro has been around since the dawn of electricity supply time, and variations on thermal storage and regen, pumped air or other working fluids all exist outside the lab.

Still, you have to acknowledge the scale of the problem. The principle scale problem here is the sheer weight of nay sayers who want to doomscroll over deployments which provide less GW and less GWh and argue directly to "this cannot handle a dunkelflaut of 10 days" or some other number.