But having electricity 13 days every two weeks is much better than not having it at all.
This isn't about China building out their grid with an over capacity factor of 200% so they can keep everything running even if rain, sun and wind all fail for months on end. This is a developing county getting to the point they can charge mobile phones consistently.
By comparison, global battery production is around 1,000 GWh per year.
For something like 20 years, people have been looking at the exponential growth in the annual solar deployments and saying "well that's it, starting next year we're only going to deploy exactly as much as last year, plus 5%-30%". And every year these predictions are proven wrong. And every year they do the same dumb thing again:
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/07/12/has-the-international...
Let's not repeat the same projection mistake with batteries that's been going on with solar for so long.
Realize that replacing all ICE road vehicles in the US with 70 kWh BEVs would require storage equal to ~40 hours of our average grid usage. The future is going to need large numbers of batteries, which is why China has been all in on this.
Assuming someone actually told you that, I think you need to reevaluate the credibility of that source.
Generally businesses are really great at balancing costs, and for highly-cost-constrained businesses if you give them 95% uptime at half the cost, the equation becomes clear. And in Africa, if the option is 95% uptime or 0% uptime, the choice is even clearer.
