One of the first things that any student of electricity economics learns is that electricity is not storable in meaningful quantities. This characteristic, in the context of peak electrical demands much higher than average demands, has meant that large amounts of capacity in generation, transmission and distribution are infrequently used.

This appears to be changing. There have been rapid developments in battery storage that might mean that batteries that are able to store reasonably large amounts of electricity become ubiquitous. This raises many interesting and important issues for producers and consumers.