Understanding Solar Energy

There is also a risk factor to be considered before we decide to add massive energy storage within residential area. I've hear that one of the reason why the recent wildfires in LA had been so devastating was because the amount of available energy to fuel the fire (tanks, batteries) around modern homes is much larger than in the past.

I'm extremely skeptical of that claim. I'd buy that, on the scale of individual houses, a large battery bank could make a fire worse. Once you get to the point of whole cities burning, I just don't buy that batteries make a difference. I _might_ be willing to believe that in some narrow technical sense some homes burned hotter or faster because they had batteries. I don't buy at all that, at the big scale, number of homes burned or total damage incurred was higher.

That being said, yes, utility scale batteries do pose somewhat of a novel risk, especially as they are new and we are figuring out the engineering. A new installation in Moss Landing has burned twice in the past several months, although according to reports, the damage was entirely contained to the facility.

A 40 kWh battery stores about as much energy as the bag of coal in your garage for the next barbecue.

If you could efficiently extract the energy, which you can't. A typical coal plant is 33% efficient. You can get 100% efficiency converting the coal to heat, but a heat pump can convert that battery energy to heat at 300-500% efficiency.

For the purpose of "burn your house down", the energy is usually extracted fairly efficiently from both coal and a battery.

And from the large amount of wood and other combustibles that make up the house and its contents.