> Batteries are orders of magnitude less than what is needed

The Chinese are about to do to the battery market what they did to the solar panel market: they are going to make the bottom drop out.

Even with current battery price projections, the German transmission operators got applications for 240 GWh (peak output of 160 GW) of new industrial battery storage capacity, in 2024 alone [0]. Not all of those applications will result in realized batteries on the grid (they probably can't even connect that many), but as of today, the financials work out and now investors want to connect more industrial storage to the grid.

So batteries in Great Britain will grow - by orders of magnitude. And the nice thing is that a battery build-up like this takes a lot of strain out of the transmission lines. It allows local renewable production to be used to an even greater extend, and if local production falls short, the existing transmission lines don't need to deliver peak loads cross-country, but instead can charge the local batteries before and after a projected peak demand.

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/energiewende-ries...

Can't find a source in English, sorry.