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.

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.

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.