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.

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.

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.

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...

Fortunately that doesn’t seem like it will be an issue since battery storage costs are also seeing an exponential reduction.

I guess using electricity to heat during the night could be an issue, but we could also accept to let the temperature drop.

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.

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.

- Solar.

- Wind.

- Nuclear.

- Pumped hydro.

- Battery.

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.

This is because people that bring that argument act like every house is it's own electric island. But that's far from the truth. In developed countries the electric grid is HIGHLY interconnected. Look at this beautiful map: https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/

So, how likely is it that it's cloudy in Bulgaria and Spain and Germany and UK and Hungary and and and ...

(It's only the US that decided to mis-design their grid. Instead of one united, where each one can help the others, they have 4 different grid. That is also one of the reason why the SAIDI --- duration of power interruptions per customer and year --- is so terribly bad).

Also, if you buy your solar cells to work with ambient light, put them into east-west (instead of south) and use an inverter that doesn't use 50W just for itself --- then you can also get power WHEN it it cloudy. Enough to sustain e.g. your router, fridge etc. Not enough to charge an EV.

But... for a day-night-cycle we have local batteries. They got cheap in the last 5 years. I mean, the cheaper ones arrive at 100 €/ kWh.

And finally: no one every proposed that "a single solution is all we need". We don't need just Ford passenger cars. We also need vans. And trucks. And buses.

By limiting your thinking artificially to "How can I oppose a situation where ONLY solar panels provide power" you're doing your own reasoning power no favor. The starting premises is already faulty, almost like a strawman attack (invent some bogus scenario, attack that scenario, hope that others that can't think sharp fail for this bad reasoning).

The fun thing is that people like you post this again and again, in every discussion. Since years. As if you're unable to learn that the world isn't only "one solar island next to another solar island". Why is it so hard to understand that a grid is inherently connected? And that we have a multitude of ways to generate electric power?

- 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)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50132343

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50198882