The base is above the floor.

 One aspect that Danielle is neglecting in her hatred of renewable energy, and I'm only unconsciously aware of recently: there's peak load sure, but equally important in designing power systems, especially storage, is minimum load. Storage doesn't have to let us keep the status quo.

Minimum load is below base load, it's the load that we really don't want unserviced. That's what storage has to provide. For everything else, the sun will come up, it'll get windy, or we can do without. 

Let's just consider residential. In your house, minimum load is likely the fridge and freezer, and not much else. When things are dire, you won't be ironing the pillow cases.

A little example: my fridge consumes an average of about 70 watts. When the compressor starts up, it uses around 1000 watts. But that's only for a minute or less. The compressor idles and the defrosting fan runs A LOT. These use about 110 watts. The light uses 40 watts. You can see when I had the door open yesterday:

I could live with a frosty fridge during power outages. 

The freezer averages 32 watts, 100 watts when it's running. 

So my minimum average load is ... 200 watts? Let's say my minimal load for the whole house is 5 KWh per day. For reference my power bills show a load of 25 KWh per day, or about 1000 watts on average.

Size the new battery farm on that stores grid power so it will let me run the fridge and freezer compressors 2 minutes out of every hour, and a fridge smart enough to deal with that supply - no defrosting. The storage only needs to be a fifth as big as you think, Danielle. 

Or better yet, subsidise house construction to include 5 KWh on-site. That will absorb the transient 1000 watt surges from compressor and pump motors, and keep me up for at least a day. I'll lend out that power when the wind isn't blowing and the grid is up. Give me solar panels at a cost anyone can manage, and I'll lend it out every night.