And when the power lines fall down in rural areas, how will people heat and power their homes? I guess they could buy some batteries, but then they'd sit idle most of the time. Maybe they could find some other profitable use and share the capital cost?

> better option is for the government/utility company to build out the required storage for a fraction of the cost

Ex ante, sure. Right now, the existing batteries are a sunk cost the utility didn’t have to pay capital costs for. The right answer is to do both.