I doubt most people can afford enough solar and battery storage to power all the air conditioning needed for the longer, hotter summers we are having.
We'll just use less coal which is a great thing, until the coal industry starts getting subsidies to stay alive in a few decades (which is certainly going to happen considering their political power).
Grid-tie is a much better answer for people and utilities though. Solves the daytime demand problem.
While you may doubt, I am quite confident. Forklift batteries are readily available and not terribly expensive. Heavy, yes, but you weren't going to put the batteries on your roof for a bunch of other reasons anyhow.
How not terribly expensive are forklift batteries? I imagine they're similar to lead acid golf cart batteries, which if I recall cost roughly $250/kwh. They're still too expensive compared to natural gas backup.
They are more expensive than natural gas backup if you buy them new at retail. But these things get un-useful in an industrial setting quite regularly while still retaining quite a bit of utility for people who just want medium term household energy storage.
Would it be practical for EVERYONE to buy these things up used? Not a chance. But if you just want to set yourself up nicely look around. They go for a few hundred used as that's all the recyclers will pay for them.
EDIT: I wasn't thinking of them in comparison to natural gas backup until you brought it up. When 10kW of solar cells cost $10k and a 5kW inverter costs another $3k-$5k the idea of paying another $5k to put in a rather large-sized battery doesn't seem all that out of place to me. But you're right that a small natural gas generator would win re: batteries.
This sounds interesting. Looks like these guys will just come out to your house and drop off a $1745 700-pound battery rated at 60 amps at 12 volts (720 watts) for 20 hours, and pick up your previous battery at no charge. They apparently will last up to 7 years even in forklift service. The main drawback seems to be that the forklift batteries are not maintenance-free.
I'm more interested in picking up a really big one for a few hundred used. If it can't do a full 8 hour shift anymore but can only do 6 hours it's nearly useless to place that really uses it. But for my purposes an 80% capacity battery is still plenty good.
They might not deliver quite as happily to a residence as to a business as the battery would likely be located in a less-than-warehouse type location. But it's definitely worth a try!
Cooling in the summer requires much less energy compared to heating in the winter. It's also a lot more of an optional comfort than a critical survival need.
Besides more thoughtful residence design and geothermal techniques, there are even obvious retrofits like automatically opening and shutting windows/blinds at dusk/dawn. In many places, that alone should be enough.
If you claim more energy is spent on heating overall I'd want a reference on that, since that goes against what I've heard. Especially since houses in cold climates tend to be a lot better insulated than houses in southern climates.
Obviously I'm talking about places that have both a real winter and a real summer. How well insulated your house is is primarily a function of the available technology and the cost of energy when it was built.
Probably the simplest reference I could give would be to point out that a lot of heavily populated places like Seattle, Chicago, the US Northeast, and much of Europe don't even install central air conditioning in homes at all. If we're talking about human survival standards of comfort, then obviously people have been living closer to the equator than you and I for a long time before AC was invented.
In the winter, often a furnace is used to burn gas or electricity in a pure "burning" of utility energy to heat. Some people have heat pumps which are more efficient, but when they hit their limits the backup furnace kicks in. Often additional water must be added to the inside air, and that must be heated as well. The temperature differential which must be maintained by the burning fuel is easily 40 deg F (say 28 to 68 on a mild day).
In the summertime, reasonable cooling involves using a refrigeration process to move heat out of the building. The refrigeration cycle isn't perfect, but it's surprisingly efficient since it's more moving the heat from one place to another. As a side effect, the inside air gets dehumidified which helps too. The summer cooling temperature difference is only 25 degrees F (say 98 to 75) on a hot day.
Yeah, cooling and heating are both just a change in heat energy, which would be the same for either except cooling is more difficult because you are lowering entropy locally, whereas heating you are just increasing entropy... at least that's how it seems to me.
On the other hand geothermal is free for the most part (to use, not installation of course).
We'll just use less coal which is a great thing, until the coal industry starts getting subsidies to stay alive in a few decades (which is certainly going to happen considering their political power).
Grid-tie is a much better answer for people and utilities though. Solves the daytime demand problem.