“If we must transition to a world where we produce energy without carbon, the missing piece is batteries..”

The big thing now is do we have the resources to be able to build enough batteries? There is most likely to be a shortage in the near future.

That’s the “killer caveat” and I would submit, this comes directly from the rote energy sector and their lobbying firms to help them hold onto control of generation and dispatch. Cost of energy storage and in particular smart interactive ESS still lies in the $1,200/kWh installed range. I find it interesting though that in larger scale systems like small commercial and Industrial microgrids costs per kWh are dropping down as the system size increases. Some of the larger microgrids are in the $750/kWh to around $500/kWh installed price point. The small business owner and residential home owner do not have budgets from $200 thousand to $1 million or more for such a technology adoption. Looking back ‘just’ 11 years ago, the cost for energy storage batteries alone was at a price point of $1,000/kWh without any appurtenances to make a complete microgrid system. So, what happens say by 2025 to 2030 when a microgrid would become a 60kWh and up system and cost $300/kWh installed, where will the utility industry be when grid agnostic becomes the next evolutionary step in energy generation, storage and use?

“They basically become time-delay equipment and nothing else,” Lund said.”
This is a typical point of view from the utility scale model, not the self reliance and resilience point of view of residential energy users. Sooner or later I believe there will be a day when residential home owners will be able to become grid agnostic and the utilities will have to decide who their customers are and who their partners are.