EON and RWE suffer because they're fossilized.


Energy storage with potential energy stores is very limited for geographic reasons and inefficient anyway.
The real promise lies AFAIK in electrified individual traffic.

Ten million electric cars by 2020 could soak up electric power at night and since the family cars are idle almost all the time they could be plugged into electrical grid and serve as millions of batteries. An electrical grid which can make use of millions of batteries as buffers could be a substantial improvement. The ability to absorb electrical energy at a low price (when there's a lot of wind in the north and sun in the south) and possibly even give it back at a high price (in competition with natural gas powerplants which usually run only at peak demand times) would be attractive to owners.

OK, this was but an example of the kind of non-traditional thinking about energy that fossilised corporations are capable of using for PR and presentations, but not capable of actually exploiting economically.
They're even bad at properly setting up the largest wind power investment projects, the offshore wind parks.

We have asimilar fossilised corporation problem in the automotive sector. German car makers (the big OEM brands) pretend to be innovative, but the French ones have been more innovative since the 1930's.
The real capability to develop novelties other than in internal combustion powerpacks has moved to the tier one suppliers anyway, and the OEMs are too timid in making use of their innovations, pressing for ever lower costs instead (FU Lopez!).

The result is the rise of companies such as Fisker, Tesla.
The Tier Ones could build an electric car easily (they completed functional conventional concept cars at ease), but fear that such a move up the value added chain will incur a boycott by the OEMs. It's basically a rarely described form of market failure.