No, if you're only now discovering this fact, you're probably not very familiar with the engineering tradeoffs that led the industry to settle on 4 hours of capacity for any given power rating. These systems are designed to fully discharge every night, and 4 hours is a good guarantee that it can.

If you have the batteries to build an 8 hour system, it's more effective, at this stage in the game, to build 2 separate 4 hour systems and place them in different places. That will offset more high-carbon peaker plant usage, compared to a single 8-hour system.

In future buildouts, the number might be able to creep higher after peaker plants are obsolete year round, but for now building a bunch of 4-hour storage sites is the most cost effective way to decarbonize.

We typically use more power during the day (industry, mostly), so the solar helps us reduce carbon based infrastructure need even without batteries. And it's just a baby step in the progression to renewables. Yes, we have a long way to go.

Sorry, I might have gotten a little defensive there.

My point is if it supplements their energy consumption with cleaner energy it's a good thing.

Even if its for a couple minutes or a couple hours its a positive improvement.

You can see California moving to deal with this issue via battery storage:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/live/fifteen_minutes

Pumped hydro is better, but not available everywhere.

I expect sodium-ion batteries to be the main type of storage going forward, but who knows?

I mean, yeah, that's kinda how it works.