R&D remains just R forever if you postpone deployment until R&D is "done", whatever that means. As a lone consumer you can let others be early adopters, but this approach is not applicable to the national economic policy level. None of the progress in renewables we saw in the last three decades would have happened with only research spending, no matter how generous. Funding research is important and immensely helpful compared to not funding research, but it can only get you so far.
Germany has been neglecting storage with the argument "but we don't need it yet" for far too long already and is already starting to suffer chicken/egg problems as a consequence. "Why build more renewables if we can't store the energy anyways" is heard quite a lot from anti-renewable populists.
There is simply no need for mass deployment, yet. We would waste a lot of money. If there are business models, which make the existing storage profitable, then it gets viable.
For example near my home town there is a pumped hydro storage facility, which the last years struggled economically.
It's also useful to distribute electricity over several countries via a grid designed to do so - something which starts for countries around the North Sea.
It's not that nothing is done. For example North Germany builds a 1.4 GW HVDC line to Norway (called NordLink) to be able to store and retrieve electricity from&to there. Additional lines can be added, and at least one is in the planning stage (called NordGer). One of these lines costs 2 billion Euros to be build.
We are also far away from having infrastructure to use electrical vehicles as a grid component - there are simply also not yet enough of these vehicles. Recycled batteries from these vehicles could be used in homes. There is a compressed air power plant running for decades. There are large gas storage systems, which could store gas produced from surplus electricity. There are first deployments of storage systems using heat, in the industry.
I would expect that more storage variants and mass deployment will start in a decade, once we reach interesting levels of cheap surplus electricity, there is large scale demand for stored electricity, and when there are viable business models.
> heard quite a lot from anti-renewable populists
I would not invest billions into storage deployment, just because populists are unhappy.
> There are large gas storage systems, which could store gas produced from surplus electricity.
Only with power to gas conversion capacity. Which is exactly what this project is trying to ramp up to practicality. "You should not do X because you could do X instead" isn't a very compelling argument.
There are a bunch of power-to-gas projects. It's already being done. But there is very little experience on a large scale industrial level. We are just starting to work on that.
What makes you think that this Spiegel link isn't talking about the exact same thing as the original article on rechargenews.com ? The latter just happens to be slightly more specific, singling out one project (likely the most concrete plan within a bigger initiative) wheras the Spiegel from two days earlier remains high level.
Correct, and it makes it again clear that this is currently not about storage, but about production of Hydrogen on a level which is mostly for consumption: vehicles, industry, heating, ... Since 20% share of renewable generated Hydrogen in 2030 is not much, scaled storage applications won't come into focus before the next decade.
With 'storage' I'm talking about systems which can provide electricity for the grid (or consumers) when other renewable sources (wind, solar, ...) are currently not available in sufficient capacity.
But methanization is part of the project and the storage of methane is both solved and deployed at scale (e.g. current German gas consumption could be served for months entirely from storage) and includes a massive x-to-electricity component (conventional gas power stations). The fact that is both storage and direct application only makes this project better than anything that's exclusively one or the other.
That does not mean that there is currently any business model for it, for example because it is extremely expensive. Technology will be applied in scale, when there is a need for it, when it is affordable and when it is price competitive with other solutions.
Germany has been neglecting storage with the argument "but we don't need it yet" for far too long already and is already starting to suffer chicken/egg problems as a consequence. "Why build more renewables if we can't store the energy anyways" is heard quite a lot from anti-renewable populists.