The 1500 kg of LiFePO4 batteries in the Newington Grid Battery commissioned at Ausgrid last May, contain the same stored energy amount when fully charged, as 12 litres of unleaded petrol. Which does not quite weigh 12 kg.

Of course we judge the cost-effectiveness of power storage on the basis of current technologies. What else are we supposed to do? If technology improves then we get a bonus, but to try and plan on the assumption that a particular technology will materialise is simply madness.

"That there windfarm is too far away to be any use, Jarge!"
"Ah, but wait till we get our Stargate, Henry!"

Further to my previous comment, the energy density of nuclear fuel is 20,000 times higher than petrol when used in the current generation of light water reactor (LWR) and up to 2,000,000 times higher when used in a breeder reactor.

Since unleaded petrol is 100 times more energy dense than the new Newington Grid Battery installation, it follows that nuclear fuel is 2,000,000 to 200,000,000 times more energy dense than those batteries.

Forget renewables. Move to the future. It's nuclear for many more reasons than just the energy density and all the important benefits that advantage alone delivers: e.g. four to six orders of magnitude small storage volume than fossil fuels, can store many years or decades of a country's fuel for electricity generation in one or more warehouses, 4-6 orders of magnitude less shipping and transport, 4-6 orders of magnitude less oil used for transporting fuel for electricity generation and 4-6 orders of magnitude less CO2 from burning oil for transport; much greater energy security for countries as a result of the ability to store years and decades of nuclear fuel.

Battery enthusiasts are merrily predicting large improvements in cost and performance. It seems not counting chickens before they are hatched doesn't apply. The round trip efficiency of wind-to-gas is under 40% ie it wastes 60-70% of the original energy. In Germany this is done by splitting water with wind powered electricity to get hydrogen, combining it with CO2 scrubbed from biogas to get artificial methane then storing it in the natural gas grid. In theory this has far greater capacity than batteries except it is grossly inefficient and the source of cheap CO2 is limited.

Unless there is a radical improvement in cheap storage it will be cheaper to generate most power in real time. We'll need affordable low carbon power on demand.

"We'll need affordable low carbon power on demand."

Yes, Taswegian, and how would you suggest we achieve that?

What could actually be done that has a high probability of success?

What is your success measure, what is your estimate of the probability of achieving it, and what is the basis for your estimate of the probability of achieving it?

The debate over energy storage utterly misses the point:

We already have plenty of efficient ways to store energy - and we can expect these to improve even further.

However, wherever there is a high concentration of energy, there is a greater risk of accidents, whereby this energy will come loose and cause enormous damage.

I would have invested myself in photo-electric equipment on my roof with a battery-farm that would suffice to make me independent of the electric grid or any other external source of energy. The only reason I didn't do so, is the risk of fire that those batteries would pose, which I was advised of.

This is a problem of a general nature, not about this the ability to improve this or that device, but about a physical principle.