From Big Batteries Needed To Make Fickle Wind And Solar Power Work, on NPR :
You can think of a fully charged battery as a source of energy, ready to sell its product to the electric grid, just the way a power plant does. For that to work, battery owners would need to buy electricity to charge the battery when the price is low, and then sell that electricity back to the grid when the price is high.
But that idea turns out to be a dud.
Not many articles in mass media or in scientific journals take the time to explain how useful batteries can be to integrate renewables. But fewer also explains, like this NPR post, that batteries, at their current cost and capabilities, are not ready for the massive deployment on the grid that is predicted by some.
Fortunately, there is much on-going research on battery technology (and on other storage technologies as well). The progress on batteries has been tremendous and steady since their invention (e.g. the impressive improvement of electric model aircraft since 70s), so there may still be technological leaps to come.
