TWENTY NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS - Fifty Percent of the nation's energy needs.

[kristopher]

27. What happens if your "air conditioner" is actually part of a home energy storage system?

Ditto for home heating. Or that both those systems have the need for electricity reduced to a fraction of what it is now because the home is (by today's standards) more than 90% proof against heat transfer and the heating cooling system is a home geothermal system?

And the batteries in cars - that's a huge resource that can not only charge during the day while people are at work, but also at night from wind, hydro or geothermal. In fact, cars sit on average about 23 hours per day so with a "smart grid" built around small distributed power plants, the owners of cars can take advantage of whatever electricity is cheapest and sell the excess in their "tank" back to the grid when the prices are highest.

The role of storage is going to be largely defined not by the down periods of wind or solar - because stepping in quickly is something that hydro, biomass, biofuels, geothermal, wave, river current and tidal will all be competing to at least cost. No, the role of storage will be largely defined by the need capture power generated by wind and solar that is in excess of demand.