What if seasonal storage became economically viable? [29]
Summary of the Article: Seasonal energy storage (SES)—solutions capable of shifting surplus renewable energy across months —is the missing complement to today’s hour‑to‑day storage. If SES were economically viable at scale, three things would change quickly: (1) renewable overbuild becomes an asset instead of a curtailment problem; (2) firm capacity for long, weather‑driven shortages (dunkelflaute/monsoon) is available without fossil back‑up; and (3) sector coupling (power‑to‑heat‑to‑power, and power‑to‑molecules) accelerates. Techno‑economic evidence indicates that low‑cost thermal seasonal storage (e.g., pit thermal energy storage in district heating) and subsurface storage of hydrogen (salt caverns or porous formations) are the most credible near‑term SES vectors, while pumped storage remains the system anchor for multi‑hour to multi‑day balancing. For India, the confluence of an 87–150+ GW pumped‑storage pipeline , the National Green Hydrogen Mission , and geological potentia...