I think you're mostly right and energy storage advances are much more exciting. However, they can substitute for each other to an extent.
For example, moving transportation off of messy and expensive fossil fuels is almost all about storage. If there was a $5, 2kg battery that could hold enough charge for a car to go 3000 miles, the world would switch to electric cars almost instantaneously.
We are also using fossil fuels to generate energy for lots of fixed usage where transmission is already in place. Take all of the coal power plants in the country and replace them with magical clean energy generation plants and you've made a vast improvement without any change in storage technology.
If storage was magically solved, then you could use wind and solar and whatever much more easily, and replace fossil fuels that way. But storage seems to be a much tougher game.
For example, moving transportation off of messy and expensive fossil fuels is almost all about storage. If there was a $5, 2kg battery that could hold enough charge for a car to go 3000 miles, the world would switch to electric cars almost instantaneously.
We are also using fossil fuels to generate energy for lots of fixed usage where transmission is already in place. Take all of the coal power plants in the country and replace them with magical clean energy generation plants and you've made a vast improvement without any change in storage technology.
If storage was magically solved, then you could use wind and solar and whatever much more easily, and replace fossil fuels that way. But storage seems to be a much tougher game.