Dirty Mike and the Boys said:
I work in midstream natural gas, so I'm familiar with gas injection, but how does injecting into the power grid work? How is power stored? A quick google search only yielded 'energy storage facilities'.
Injection in the context of my post is simply electrons going through the breaker onto the high-voltage grid at the generation site.
The only viable energy storage right now is hydraulic -- pump water into an uphill reservoir during off-peak hours, release it downhill through a generator during on-peak. Expensive to build, hard to cycle.
There's some interesting ideas out there right now. For instance, build a couple of miles of electrified railroad up a hill in the middle of nowhere and set up the motive power such that it can generate power into traction or traction into power; send a trainload of gravel up the hill when power is cheap and let it coast down on-peak. Same concept as pumped storage but more flexible. Still not cost-effective, though.
The silver bullet right now is some sort of durable, cost-effective utility-scale battery to allow renewable energy to be stored for times when the sun is down and the wind's not blowing. I'm a cynic, so I expect such a solution to require strip mining of minerals in China with significant pollution just so proto-socialist Druids in San Francisco can rustle their gender-fluid jimmies.