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The article does not make a big enough deal of another saving for the utility - it means that when snow takes out lines, they have more time to deal with the problems before customers start complaining. That can be quite significant if the utility can wait 12 hours for storms to pass, then fixing things becomes significantly easier.

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I'm not sure how much of a benefit this is. Many/most houses/commercial sites won't have batteries (or at list some significant minority). They'll still complain. Power companies will still have a duty to restore power ASAP for health and safety reasons. Either way, they'll only repair the lines when it's safe to do so, and they'll continue doing that.

In Sweden we solved this by putting most power lines under ground and Sweden has the same population density and is larger. Power outages during storms is a thing of the past in most of Sweden.

Not saying this option would be better, we started this project way before batteries was a realistic option.

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