When they’re not bursting into toxic fireballs, the contribution made by giant lithium-ion batteries remains utterly trivial. They are, after all, electricity storage devices and don’t add a lick to electricity generation capacity, anywhere.
The cost of battery storage, at scale, is out of all proportion to the benefits returned and we wouldn’t be having this discussion were it not for the hopeless intermittency of wind and solar. No one talked about electricity storage when we allowed nuclear, coal-fired and gas-fired plants to deliver power, 24 x 7, whatever the weather.
At best, battery storage provides additional frequency control at the margins, but it’s the chaotic delivery of wind and solar that increased demand for that as a “service” which grid managers pay a premium for.
But that’s not the pitch put forward by the wind and solar acolytes, who tell us that by adding more and larger lithium-ion batteries…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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