the reason that thermal storage is becoming very atractive is that electrical power from PV, wind, and other sources has become increadably cheap, and there is litteraly no where to put it, so prices go negative now, which is a new thing.
so 500x cheaper may be an understatement, considering the nature of how cheap, mature and availible the technology to build a thermal storage battery is, any municicipal civil engineering team can build one from off the shelf and localy sourced materials, and the basic battery "housing" could be a re purposed industrial building, cheap does not begin to describe it.
> Two economists are walking down the street. One of them says “Look, there’s a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk!” The other economist says “No there’s not. If there was, someone would have picked it up already.”
In this case, the economics of solar has been changing rapidly in recent years, so the caveat won't apply. Worst case, you can bend over and get a closer look.
Yeah, presumably the Software Engineer laughs at the two moronic "experts" and picks up the religious literature or strip club ad masquerading as cash.
Combination of very cheap periodic power and suitable infrastructure to supply heat energy is more recent phenomena. Supply that is very cheap power and demand that is capability to use that energy later need to match.
