>We need something to work on cloudy / rainy days after all.
Even without storage, interconnecting grids with HVDC across the US (or across a continent) solves this problem really really nicely. China is already building tons of HVDC to do this, and we need to as well. Long haul transport over HVDC is also cheaper than peaker plants.
That said, natural gas peaker plants stick around as long as the fuel costs are low, and the capital has already been sunk into the plant. But for new capacity, I think there's going to be a huge shift towards storage.
No reason other than them being more expensive than batteries:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-22/batteries-...
>We need something to work on cloudy / rainy days after all.
Even without storage, interconnecting grids with HVDC across the US (or across a continent) solves this problem really really nicely. China is already building tons of HVDC to do this, and we need to as well. Long haul transport over HVDC is also cheaper than peaker plants.
That said, natural gas peaker plants stick around as long as the fuel costs are low, and the capital has already been sunk into the plant. But for new capacity, I think there's going to be a huge shift towards storage.