Not an expert, but the biggest downside from renewables seems to be the swings in production. Solar is obviously not useful at night. Wind comes and goes.
Batteries and other forms of energy storage to normalize distribution are more important for renewables than fossil fuels.
Indeed. Assuming you have a sustainable source, the next most important thing is distribution and storage.
The cleanest candidate (Hydrogen-from-electrolysis) suffers from storage and distribution issues. These can be overcome, but at high cost.
The easiest (batteries) suffer from a combination of storage and distribution issues (heavy batteries have to be transported, you can't pipe them around, energy grids have power transmission costs/depend on batteries to work, an ouroborian problem) as well as toxicity issues.
Given that batteries cannot indefinitely become cheaper, and likely that demand will outpace supply, clean hydrogen, not batteries, seem the logical ultimate choice.
