Feasibility is debatable, but you've moved the needle. Certainly, if you happen to be in the middle of the wilderness where natural gas isn't available, batteries could be considered feasible in those conditions at least.
I said feasible. I never said reasonable. Not at current prices and current average incomes. But that wasn't what I was debating. I was debating the assertion that solar can not be base load source for everything, when clearly it can. Physics doesn't prevent it. Manufacturing doesn't prevent it. Finance only makes it difficult, not impossible, and it's actually not totally out of the realm of possibility even now. People, perhaps inadvisably, pay considerably more for a car than it would cost to equip their house with 5 days of battery backup. The purchasing power is certainly there for a large fraction of the population, or SUVs would cost a lot less. And everything I referenced when calculating actual prices and capacities is an off-the-shelf product. No lab vaporware required.
I never claimed pumped storage was necessary or even desirable. I'm not sure who did. I hadn't seen any such claim before this discussion.
Flood calculators are popular for visualizing the effects of sea level rise, so I wouldn't be surprised if you've played with one written in Javascript on a page that talks about "if sea level rose 6 inches, it would flood ...."
I haven't, no. I believe the more lurid tales of possible climate change consequences are nothing more than marketing of the "if it bleeds, it leads" variety. Bullshit, in other words. No reputable model predicts catastrophic anything, and for more than a decade now they've all predicted temperatures that are too warm compared to what the actual temperature now is.
No, photovoltaics and battery backups interest me for a much more important reason: energy independence. REAL energy independence, not some bogus "the nation is energy independent" irrelevance. I'm talking about personal energy independence. It's physically possible right now. Financially, it's iffy. If you get lucky and operational lifespans of the equipment you buy are on the high end of what's possible, you can pay off a current system and enjoy several years of zero power bills. Truly zero, with neither a utility bill nor a payment on capital equipment. As the equipment gets better and the price gets lower, that period extends longer and longer, and no longer requires you to get lucky with lifespans. There will come a time when it's a virtual certainty that I can achieve true independence, and maintain it indefinitely. That's when I pull the trigger (personal finances permitting) and get a pallet and a half of solar panels and a pallet of batteries delivered.
I predict it will happen before the decade is out, thanks largely to the efforts of Elon Musk.