A renewable planet is almost inevitable — engadget.com

There are generally two kinds of arguments against renewable energy: the cost and the lack of consistency. After all, solar panels can't work in the dark and wind turbines don't turn on still days, but we still need to charge our smartphones 24/7. The solution here is to build large-scale energy storage (read: really big batteries), but they're not economically viable. Except that isn't true -- not anymore, anyway. Bloomberg recently reported that the price of batteries has fallen 40 percent since 2014. These plunging prices have been so pronounced that big financial institutions are now throwing their weight behind the energy-storage market. Bloomberg also reports that institutions like Investec and Prudential have piles of cash earmarked to put behind industrial battery projects. Indeed, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IREA) believes that we're on track to be able to store 250 gigawatts of electricity by 2030.

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