The answer to this is obvious. Until very recently, solar was less than 100% of midday electricity. What would have been the point of installing batteries? To charge them with natural gas?
Well, you miss the point: we do not have much storage because it last way too little at certain daily load. It's simply way to costly so far to have a nation-wide grid full of renewables, while we can make p.v. grow at small scale, for self-consumption reducing the daily load on the grid, when the grid is most charged.
