Economics or accounting 101 for inventors:
I remember noting the campus at UCI seemed physically split between the “facts” side of campus and the “emotions” side of campus. All the hard sciences and engineering were on one side, all the arts, sociology, "English’, writing, media, etc., were on the other side. It was almost as though they didn’t want the emotion people knowing any hard facts, and didn’t want the “facts” people knowing anything social. This, I felt, was designed to produce useful and “harmless” workers. Keep peoples’ noses to the grindstone, following orders, knowing their place.
Then you have the accounting department, economics, etc., somewhere between hard and soft science (Economics is often called “the dismal science”.)
Anyway, an engineer is trained to solve engineering problems for an existing company. So they are not always familiarized with accounting principles. And most people watch artificially-created stories for entertainment, rather than the financial channels.
So here is a little accounting for you:
When an investor considers how to deploy his (her) capital, (how to invest their money) they are forced to compare various options that promise various returns.
Government bonds are considered the safest, but offer a low return of a few percent per year. Stocks of newer companies may go up in value, or stocks of more established industries may return a dividend or utilize stock buybacks to return value to the investors.
So someone investing toward the construction of a power plant has to calculate their projected return.
Building the plant will cost a lot of money. How many hours per day can the plant sell power, and at what price, to get you a good return on your hard-earned money?
If the answer is it can only sell power for 3 hours per day, that is only 1/8 (12.5%) of how many hours most power plants can sell power, even though the cost of the plants might be comparable.
So are you going to sell the stored power for eight times (8x) the normal price for electricity? If not, how do you expect to get a return on our investment?
This is the reality they don’t usually concentrate so much on in engineering or policy-centered studies. In the end, it’s often back to fairly simple arithmetic that we are not always taught to think about that determines whether projects of any kind are economically viable, which is what determines whether they are just a failed experiment, or the future.