I don't really think that batteries are so necessary, and this development is phenomenal.

This is huge. It means wind is cheaper than nuclear, even with most subsidies.

We don't need batteries -- Arthur Rosenfeld has done work going way back that shows how distribution isn't a problem for windpower. That's a widespread myth, perpetuated by media echo chambers, funded by big business.

Peak wind != peak demand.

That's all you really need to know to realize this is a storage and distribution problem.

Nuclear, coal, oil, natural gas, geothermal, hydro --- all the ways we currently make power are always available.

Did you know that superconducting power lines are commercially feasible, right now, for high capacity lines? Negawatt proposals account for a large part of the problem, if you make distribution efficient. And it can be made very efficient using superconducting lines.

For the brief periods where the world's overall wind production is low, if wind ever takes over most of the grid (it probably won't, considering the political dynamics), there is already a very effective storage technology -- liquid hydrogen. It has a practically limitless capacity (just add more tanks), and it avoids the toxicity problem of batteries, and it avoids the materials problem of fuel cells (still, nobody has found something cheap to replace platinum.)

Until hydrogen is stored in a solid material, using what some would call nanotech but what I call physics, it isn't going to be common. This isn't to say this is far off, just the way I see it coming -- with knowledge gleaned from physics PhDs working on the problem.

But the simple answer is 'yes'. Hydrogen could make an excellent base for a battery.

Right, but could this type of small-scale generator partially alleviate the distribution problem? I think that's one of the main points of this invention...

The issue with distribution is getting power from where there is wind to where there is not. It is not about just making the generation system distributed, though that would also be a good thing.