It would be astronomically infeasibly expensive to build batteries to back up a system that simply does not have enough generation that either can be ramped up or put online, and has no ties to other grids that can provide the power, e.g. the Texas system.
As I mentioned in #6 I wrote about the limitations, compared to a generation source, and in particular about the Texas situation:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127170924
I wouldn't say the batteries are just useful for a "local" outage. They can help the grid as a whole recover from a plant tripping offline until there's time to get other generation going. (Hopefully there will be other generation offline that can be started and put online -- or already online whose output can be ramped up -- that's usually the case, but might not be the case in Texas during peak conditions).
and this remark about batteries compared to generating plants:
And 4 hours (if these are 4 hour batteries) is not a lot of storage (whereas Prairie Island generates its capacity 24/7/365 with more than 90% capacity factor).
NNadir has written about how, to cover something like the German Dunkleflaute of November - December 2022,
"The 266.4 M Poweralls required for the 30 days in Germany would be 31.6 times the world production of cobalt in 2021." (the 30 days is 11/15 - 12/14/22) https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127158224
I'm not a battery fanatic. That said, they can help with some system issues that I've covered in this thread, and if one has a battery pack on the system, it can and should be utilized.
I'd guess that the utilities that added a battery pack to extend the ability of a solar system to cover high system loads near and after sundown (#12 above) did an economic and performance analysis of that vs. other solutions (like building more gas turbine units). It's possible that the analysts and decision makers were a bunch of ring-a-ding-dongs that made their decision based on ideological biases, but I think that's unlikely.
As for batteries losing a lot of their capability in the cold, I live in Minnesota so I'm well aware of that.
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