[lostlogin]

Give us decent batteries and all will be well. My parents just scrapped their solar set up. Summer days in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, provides enough sun to have the charging switch off at about 9am, batteries full. Big Mac Pro, lots of IT gear, coffee machine, vacuum cleaner etc all used normally. No problem. But come winter the batteries would be perilously low, risking damage. Days and days of torrential rain prevented any meaningful charging. The ability to store more power economically would be so very handy. The panels would provide vastly more power than was used during a year, but were uneconomic due to not being able to feed it back to the grid (!!?!) and not being able to store enough. I'd say that decent power storage was a bigger problem than the generation.

[chii]

is it possible to somehow convert the power gathered during summer and spread it out for use during winter (when there is less sun), by say, electrolysing water to produce hydrogen and then use that as a chemical store of fuel?

[Gravityloss]

if you could feed it to the grid, hydro and coal and natural plants could be throttled down or some units shut down. I don't know about nz energy mix but I assume they have lots of hydro power. This is the natural straight forward way if doing it, not installing heavy batteries at homes. You can simulate adding different power sources to the grid with commercial software.

I'm sick and tired of this "but it's intermittent" canard.

[dalke]

No. As the previous poster wrote, "The ability to store more power economically would be so very handy."