Lar,

Longtime no see, hoping that you are doing fine. Happy New Year!

- Agreed with your first point that the stuff like different kind of batteries or whatever are just storage devices. And of course, when you go through a conversion process the efficienct is never 100%, i.e. something will be lost.

- "Powerwall would tend to encourage energy consumption": There would be nothing wrong with consuming the energy that you need while there is nothing else available, especially when you are faced with a dire situation (freezing in the dark). An example would be losing your power grid for several days (e.g. during an ice storm, it happenned quite a few times in Canada). I would be thanful to have a Powerwall connected to a few solar panels, even if the Powerwall costs a fortune (I would get one as a back-up power source if the price is dropped from $5k to $1 or 2k. Just let it sit fully charged in the garage).

Another advatage of having a storage device would be to use the grid to charge it up (at night at low rates) and sell it back to the system during peak demand (at high rate). Currently, some people have this sweetheart deal from the government.

BTW, another storage device which has been used by utility companies (to make $B) is to pump water up the water reservoir during low demand (at night) and release the water during the day to sell electricity at higher rates.

- Solar and wind energy: Currently, their contribution is tiny. They would need to be expanded in a big way to have an impact on the energy production side...but to be fair to other source of energy, are solar and wind power are absolutely safe and risk-free? Note: With proper scrubbing technology a coal burning operation could be made "clean enough".

Agreed that solar and wind power are intermittent, but they could back each other up (i.e. hoping that wind is available at night when the sun goes to sleep). Another way to look at it is storage devices could be considered as back up for both solar and wind, since without the storage devices to capture the power their power would just go to waste. The storage devices would be our source of energy in a rainy and windless day. In a broad sense it could be considered as an energy generator.

My rant for the day.

GH