IHeartBadCode

Very insightful. At grid scale the line between them just blurs because of how they're ultimately used. But there are some differences and ultimately a grid scale pack would be both packed in one. With caps taking the blows to smooth into the chemical storage of the battery behind it or head right back out before a need to store in the chemical behind the cap.

I keep telling people, production isn't the problem in most national grids. The issue is distribution. Power plants operate on-demand. That means when you flip on your light switch, some power plant somewhere has to spin just a little bit more faster to account for you turning on the light. And when you turn it off, it has to spin just a little bit slower.

There's no buffer for the in-between. We have the same issue with water pipes. The pumps pump the water out at some fixed rate and everyone uses the water at some variable rate. The difference is that with water we have something that acts as a buffer, we call them water towers. So when someone shuts off their sink, instead of pumping a little slower, we just send the excess water to a tower. And when demand goes up, instead of pumping faster, we just empty the tower.

Electricity has something similar, they're called batteries. And every national grid of developed countries has been in need of them since the 1970s. But we just keep doing neat little tricks with averaging to prevent investment in grid batteries. So this is going to continue to be an issue until nations start biting the bullet on this issue. More solar panels is great, but that's not the major problem at the moment.

And don't get me started with transmission lines.