Battery Storage For Grid Backup: Better Keep Working On It
July 08, 2026/ Francis Menton
Advocates of generating electricity mostly with intermittent wind and sun, when challenged on how they would deal with a calm night, are always ready with the obvious answer: energy storage. Just get some batteries, store up excess power from the windy mid-days, discharge as needed, and everything will work out.
Unfortunately, the advocates never acknowledge that the problem of making an electrical grid work 24/7/365 with mostly wind and solar generation is much more difficult than just storing power from the day to discharge that night. Both wind and sun are subject to regular “droughts,” just like rain. There can be many consecutive days, or even weeks, of combined low wind and sun; let alone the entire winter has a lack of sun, and both summer and winter have less wind than spring and fall. Calculating how much energy storage will suffice to get through even a year of average wind/sun variability is a straightforward exercise, yielding an answer of as much as 1000 hours of average consumption. Meanwhile, naive politicians (those in New York being Exhibit A) regularly get duped into buying a few hours or tens of hours worth of batteries for grid backup, spending billions of dollars on amounts of storage that will be almost useless for backing up a primarily wind/sun grid.
I first wrote about this subject way back in 2018, and have had many follow-up pieces since. The conclusion of my pieces has been that to obtain sufficient battery storage to back up a primarily wind/sun grid using current lithium-ion battery technology, and even assuming best case future cost reductions and economies of scale, would cost the full GDP and more of any jurisdiction that makes the effort.
Well, who says you can only use lithium-ion technology? The massive Biden-era green energy handout statutes (e.g., the “Inflation Reduction Act”), together with green energy enthusiasm generally, have brought forth a gusher of entrepreneurialism looking for new, better and cheaper energy storage systems. Recent comments on some of my posts, as well as those of daughter Jane over at @janementonnyc on Instagram, have advocated for two new technologies of energy storage as the solution to the intermittency problem. Those two are flywheel batteries, and iron-air batteries. Could either of those really work?
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2026-7-8-battery-storage-for-grid-backup-better-keep-working-on-it
