In the last few years, they have displaced a huge chunk of the natural gas power used in early evenings after sunset when solar drops off but demand is still high.
https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2024-08-25/b...
I firmly believe battery production can scale up very fast. Indeed, that's exactly what's been happening.
Realize that to replace all the motor vehicles in the US with BEVs would need enough batteries to store at least 40 hours of the average US grid output. This is almost certainly much more than would be needed for the grid itself.
The bottlenecks are in processing materials, forming anodes and cathodes and packaging them into cells. Processes preserved across most chemistries. There is a reason the guys who built Li-on plants are pretty good at building LFP plants, and why the guys building LFPs are making announcements about sodium.
This is the glory of industry: if the process is profitable, you can stamp out factories and generate ever larger profits, up to the point the market is saturated.
You could also buy a medium-sized lithium package now and already help with the transition, if you have the means, and then buy a full pack once the new hype tech becomes production-ready in 30 years (perhaps sooner but, with current warming, that's not something I'd wait on)
No. This is a false dichtomy pushed, from what I can tell, by the gas lobby. It's solar and wind + nukes or gas.
Batteries work in theory but not in practice: production doesn't scale fast enough, and that was before LLMs brought a new and growing source of power demand to the table. (I'm ignoring that grid batteries compete with transport electrification. A combination of economies of scale and common bottlenecks in construction of battery plants, irrespective of chemistry, links the pursuits.)