I share your concerns. I've been looking into DIY flow batteries as an alternative for middle-income groups, but that approach isn't promising so far; we're still talking five figure sums up front to store just 45kWh (rounded-off, high side of average daily US residential utilization). Unsurprisingly for those well-versed in thermodynamics, energy is just plain expensive to store; another way of putting that is fighting against entropy is monetarily expensive.
These technologies are currently only accessible to highly-determined and resourceful people (those willing to make fundamental changes to their electricity consumption patterns, or those with 2+ sigma annual disposable income to fund their individual solution), and are still not ready for mass, de-centralized adoption. Grid-scale deployments might be another story, but any talk of a mass wave of private individuals adopting this technology is not matching up with the numbers I've run.
A combination of energy conservation and energy production technologies and techniques, I can see gaining traction, but that is a long, long (2+ decades) ways off in the US (Germany is potentially leading the way here IMHO).
These technologies are currently only accessible to highly-determined and resourceful people (those willing to make fundamental changes to their electricity consumption patterns, or those with 2+ sigma annual disposable income to fund their individual solution), and are still not ready for mass, de-centralized adoption. Grid-scale deployments might be another story, but any talk of a mass wave of private individuals adopting this technology is not matching up with the numbers I've run.
A combination of energy conservation and energy production technologies and techniques, I can see gaining traction, but that is a long, long (2+ decades) ways off in the US (Germany is potentially leading the way here IMHO).