system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why is electricity apparently so difficult to store effectively?

In my environmental science class, we're currently discussing alternative energy sources such as geothermal, wind, and solar.  The professor explained that, while clean and effective, wind and solar do not have a 100% uptime capability that other energy sources do.  I asked why we don't just store the energy and he said that we can't, but when I asked for clarification he didn't respond.  Is electricity just inherently not really  storable, or do we just not have efficient batteries, or is it something else?
gpt
It's not quite right to say electricity is harder to store. Energy is hard to store, full stop.


We tend to think of oil and gas as an energy source, but oil and gas are much more like a battery - they're a very convoluted method for storing solar power, more or less. That's why we can't synthesize it effectively - it's even harder to make oil than it is to make a good battery.


Gas and oil get a pass in our mental map of energy storage mediums because *we* didn't make it. It was made a long, long time ago very, very slowly. It seems inexhaustible because there is a lot of it out there, but there is a very real, hard limit to how much of it is available, and we can't make more by any human-scale process.