Currently there's more than 100 concentrated solar thermal plants, generating 7GWh of power, deployed around the world with a another 30 under construction right now in China and a third generation plant being designed here in Australia while the second gen is currently being built and tested after the success of first gen pilot.
It's happening, it just hasn't yet arrived at scale.
In parallel we're also seeing the rise of solar -> green hydrogen | ammonia | methanol for use in heavy primary industry (mining and transport) which is a decent chunk of fossil fuel use to be displaced.
Germany has 50 million cars. Are you saying that after those have been turned eletric their batteries alone would be enough to cover the countrys battery needs?
Ergo the rise of concentrated solar thermal plants (CSPS) and using excess peak solar to produce hydrogen, ammonia, methonal, etc for off peak (night time) demand.
Batteries aren't the only way in which energy can be offset by 10 hours to meet lower night time demand.
Renewables still help without storage. Every TWh of electricity produced from wind and solar is a TWh that was not produced by burning coal. If you reduce the coal consumption in the existing coal power plants by 50% it's as beneficial as closing half the number of plants.
That said sure, we need to build storage, and I think the first and most important step is to remove the political obstacles currently in place to prevent people and companies from generating and storing their own electricity.
You can (and this is being done in practice) regulate the power output instead of turning it off completely and then turning it on again, doing it your way would be extremely detrimental to the power plant's life due to thermal stress. It's also the case that different coal plants have different capabilities so when you claim it takes a around week to turn off a plant, you should provide some more information about the plant (type) you're talking about.
I have been told that the big problem is actually transmission and load scaling.
Energy storage is a big part of that, but really boring, non headline grabbing things like better/more transmission lines and slightly more sane usage patterns make up the low hanging fruit.
Solar/wind power plant + storage at the same place and consider it as one unit. Then you have a powerplant which can supply electricity on demand (as gas, coal, nuclear can) and you don't need to worry about rebuilding whole grid.
You still have the unresolved problem that wind and solar do not produce on-demand.
Any other market would have dropped a production machine already that does not produce on-demand.
It's like having a worker that only works when they feel working and be it 3 AM in the morning. No company boss would accept such a behavior in the long term.
For wind and solar, it's just widely accepted and rather than accepting that you can't build an electricity grid on top of unreliable generation, people try to come up with all kind of weird solutions to force a solution based on solar and wind.
And seem to fail to understand that industrial electricity demand is flexible nowadays. And has been for almost a decade now.
So to put it in your words, yes, companies are absolutely accepting that kind of behaviour from their electricity suppliers. Companies are even benefiting greatly from it.
Currently there's more than 100 concentrated solar thermal plants, generating 7GWh of power, deployed around the world with a another 30 under construction right now in China and a third generation plant being designed here in Australia while the second gen is currently being built and tested after the success of first gen pilot.
https://theconversation.com/batteries-wont-cut-it-we-need-so...
It's happening, it just hasn't yet arrived at scale.
In parallel we're also seeing the rise of solar -> green hydrogen | ammonia | methanol for use in heavy primary industry (mining and transport) which is a decent chunk of fossil fuel use to be displaced.