Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities

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117. I'm going to point you to a website (one of my new favorites)

where Tom Murphy at the University of California San Diego does a much better job than I could at describing why solving only 1% of our storage needs with pumped hydro would be an incredible accomplishment - using real physics and real math.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

Many well-intentioned renewables advocates are largely math/physics illiterate, and a rudimentary grasp is necessary to put these ideas on a scale and see whether they make any sense at all. Distributed storage among EVs is another idea where when you do the math it's not going to be practical.

So the energy storage issue is a big problem with no clear solution in sight. As many people know around here, I'm a nuclear advocate. It's not because I don't think there are problems with nuclear - there are. With runaway global warming possibly decades away, however, our options are limited. The energy density of nuclear is off the charts - a chunk of uranium the size of a cigarette lighter is enough to provide power for a family of four, for a year. A pellet the size of your fingernail has more energy than a boxcar full of coal. Nuclear electricity combined with electric vehicles could reduce our carbon contribution to the atmosphere by 90%, and without getting too far into the subject of safety, I believe the dangers of nuclear power have been as overestimated as the viability of renewable energy.