[jtriangle]

Usually it's a backup thing, not a 24/7 thing. If you're really out in the sticks, solar/battery/genset is a very likely complete system. I know of a couple places way up north in Saskatchewan that have what amounts to a mining village running off a big portable genset backed up with batteries, and one of them I know was just on a very big genset, and they were able to pay for a battery bank by downsizing their generator significantly due to the disparity between peak load and average load. I'd share the article I read about it, but, in spite of my normally excellent google-fu, I've been unable to find it.

Either way, people forget about this, because if you have any sort of power generation, doesn't matter the method, if you go over capacity, you have brownouts/blackouts/grid failure/etc. What is deployed now, for the most part, is sufficient genset capacity to ramp into peak load, and most of it is under-utilized the majority of the time. Batteries eventually pay for themselves because of this, as they allow for peak load handling in addition to allowing generating capacity to stay online and remain profitable outside of peak load events. It really is revolutionary.

More or less, gridscale batteries are what dams/reservoirs were to water systems, and if you consider the impact of us as a species being able to save water for later use at-will, the promise we're looking at is going to really change the way we live.