However, I do see a realistic use of some battery storage to provide seconds or a minute of power if the grid was to switch sources. I.e. Think of a solar farm providing power during a sunny day, but a sudden rain shower means having to quickly scale up a natural gas plant, and battery storage for the grid providing uninterrupted power for those seconds during the switch.
My decentralized/home solar does this. My inverters are set to pull power from the grid only if there's not enough solar coming in, and only if my battery stack's charge (SOC for strength of charge) is at or below 30%. So if my battery stack gets that low, my inverters start pulling from the grid, yet my inverters show pulling a hair more power than they "wanted" to from the batteries until the transition to the grid is complete. The same thing the next morning when the sun comes up and there's a gradual shifting of depending on the solar power. (My inverters might accidentally charge the batteries a little with grid power, even though they're set to not do it, because the battery power is the kind of slush fund to help the inverters with a little bit of the over and under on how much they can depend on solar in the early hours.)
But none of this is for people not willing to do their homework. Unfortunately, with the left it's more about their doomsday warmageddon cult than about practical engineering.
“I’m having trouble processing in my mind the need or the feasibility of grid battery storage, at least for the purported reasons (i.e. powering the grid through the night for hours until the sun comes back up).”
It’s not that hard to understand. The choke point for solar power is in the evening when people are home, awake, and busy, but the sun is next to useless. Getting through that bump requires either new powerplants or batteries. An average home runs on about 1 kW excluding AC, Electric Heating, and Tesla Charging, so 8 kWh of battery is plenty and, these days, is small and relatively cheap (maybe $3k for batteries and associated hardware, plus labor).
The question then becomes - do you require, or even want, people who don’t know how to stop a smoke alarm from beeping to have 8 kWh and associated electronics in their homes, or do you put it all in large, battery farms. Well, ‘investors’ have decided to put it in battery farms.
By the way - do you know why they always seem to locate the battery farms in highly populated areas, when they could be in the middle of farms or deserts and do perfectly fine supporting the grid there? Question for our audience - let’s see if anyone gets it right.
It works great on the homeowner scale. I have a 1500 sq ft home in East Texas. My 13KW system utilizes 662 sq ft of panels, and a 2x2x4 ft battery rack that will definitely go way beyond nighttime hours if it had to. It's actually gone over 3 days when it was very darkly overcast. I've been on it more than a year now, air conditioning and all. It went back on the grid for about an hour last November. But, I could have redirected it to pull from the generator instead. You are correct that the average Joe won't keep up with the technology and run the numbers.
I think the issue is that if the power companies can't control it and be the only one profiting from it, then they don't want you to have it, either. That's why they are so reluctant to buy back power from residential solar owners, and even go as far as trying to convince local municipalities that solar is a bad idea, unless THEY are the only ones doing it. As far as fires go, new solar batteries have built-in fire extinguishing systems, and this article is little more than clickbait.