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There are a lot of reasons why energy storage is beneficial - this is why so much effort has been spent trying to devise ways to store energy. One of the simplest is pumped hydro, where the water is pumped back into the reservoir to store the energy, but the places where you can do this are limited. I have a friend that spent quite a few years trying to develop a system that moved rocks into an out of a quarry using essentially chairlift equipment as a way to store energy. The efficiency of the process was ultimately too low.
The driver behind moves in this space are ultimately financial and market driven. Large storage facilities make their money because they'll buy electricity when it's cheap (high supply and/or low demand), store it, and sell it when it is at a high price (low supply and/or high demand). As a by product of all this the whole system should work more efficiently as the volatility in electricity supply caused by wind and solar are effectively filtered out.
Distributed storage also means the transmission and distribution networks themselves don't need to be as robust as the electricity can be distributed through the system's bottlenecks when the demand is low (and hence electricity cheap) and then that electricity can be drawn upon when demand is high. If the pricing mechanism is working, once again this is simply an outcome of market participants behaving rationally (buy low, use/sell high). Without distributed storage these bottlenecks need to be widened, which is expensive and ultimately everyone pays for it though their electricity bills - something like half your bill is transmission and distribution cost. The electricity itself is a small component.
Getting electricity networks to operate effectively is a a big problem when wind and solar become dominant in the energy mix. Many parts of Europe are struggling with this at the moment. This Tesla product seems like a step in the right direction, but it would be even better if it wasn't designed to store your own solar generation. I'd like to buy my electricity off peak and store it for the peak.
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