Which definition of 'buffer' are you using here? Enough to supply day to day drops, or some kind of year-round system?
Wind and solar would need to scale up two orders of magnitude, and it's not hard to imagine batteries scaling along with them. How many more orders of magnitude would batteries need to scale up?
That is 100% fine. It only has to scale as fast as the power production. If they're both scaling two orders of magnitude, they should work hand in hand just fine.
> Day to day drops are realistic, but buffering from summer to winter is out of question really.
Good! Day to day is all you need. It's ridiculous to use batteries between seasons, and there are far better technologies to use.
The current battery prices are reflective of relatively small spale, high value needs of consumer electronics industry and a nascent electric car industry. Hopefully the price will drop massively, like it did for solar panels, but currently we can't even produce enough for cars
Not really, worldwide production capacity is several magnitudes below what would be necessary to buffer a large renewable rollout. The most realistic way to do it is natural gas, as they do in Australia.
Plus, current battery production requires materials that are highly problematic from an environmental standpoint.
> There are numerous markets with very high % of renewables already, and it turns out utility operators are very smart and know how to plan very well.
Which ones would that be? Look at Germany: Total failure to reduce CO2, high reliance on coal. Look at Australia: Supported almost entirely by natural gas. Those are the biggest rollouts of wind energy besides China, but you cannot trust any numbers coming out of China.