Mark P. Mills: "To fix green unreliability, proponents are pushing grid-scale batteries. For perspective, however, consider what would be required for the Texas grid to handle predictable occurrences of several days without wind or sunlight. The quantity of batteries needed equals a decade’s worth of the entire world’s production, at a cost well north of $400 billion, an amount of money that could build enough nuclear plants to power the entire Texas grid for the next century, not just a few days."
"This says nothing about the global emissions associated with fabricating the batteries. Most batteries, and the key materials needed to make them, are produced mainly in Asia (primarily China) on coal-dominated grids. Don’t ignore, either, the gigatons of “energy minerals” that must be mined, along with those attendant environmental and geopolitical costs. The storage of electricity at grid scales is limited by physics barriers, not engineering challenges."