If PV prices continue to plummet like this, it'll become feasible to just produce hydrogen. It's not optimal that there isn't a grand plan but there are various ways how even base load can be covered through storage once it's set up
This is a gas industry falsehood that has to stop being spread.
Hydrogen efficiency would have to improve ~350% to be competitive with current battery electric stored power. That’s just never going to happen, particularly as battery electric is dropping ~15% in price / becoming more efficient every year.
Battery electric is to power storage what silicon has been to chip manufacturing.
But the point isn’t that it’s “better” it’s just that gas (really only H2) provides the volume of storage to meaningfully transfer energy between seasons. It’s mostly about capacity not about efficiency
If you need to fill a 20 hour storage system in 4 hours of sunlight, you care about how cheap the electricity is to generate and overproduce accordingly in better seasons. PV is cheap, and also not the only renewable so it may not even be as bad as 20:4.
If you need to fill a 6 month night storage system with the sunlight from the other 6 months, instead of overproducing in summer you care about the storage being relatively stable and dense enough you don't run out of space. There may well be enough space, though at the scales that matter you'd need a lot of pipes or transmission lines depending on where you want the hydrogen powered generators, and a good electricity grid diminishes the need to store it anyway (a sufficiently good grid, 1m^2 aggregate cross section, doesn't even need any storage, because the planet is a sphere).
Given how many people react as badly to hydrogen as to nuclear, just replacing Chernobyl with the Hindenburg and a misunderstanding about hydrogen bombs, I think sufficient storage will be tricky politically even if you solve all the technical issues.
If you see a way to make it happen anyway, go for it. A plurality of solutions makes black swan correlated failures less damaging.
Guess what: we already have the storage capacity for that. We currently have something like 200TWh of gas storage. Once we don’t need that anymore for heating (give it 30 years) it’s free for hydrogen storage. This pretty much selects the locations for the grid-scale electrolyze installations. They must be either next to the storage sites or along the pipes. The latter already covers significant parts of Germany. Yes it’s inefficient, I’d be surprised if you even get 50% roundtrip efficiency, but it’s effectively free (at least compared to build battery capacity or nuclear power plants).
If only chemistry was so forgiving. The existing methane infrastructure isn't nothing, but it's also (from everything I've heard whenever this comes up) not everything either.
OTOH, I have heard hydrogen is a lot friendlier when mixed with methane, so I assume this will still be very useful when transitioning to whatever comes next.
Sure the storage tanks aren’t completely tight, so you will have some amount of leakage. But that’s (afaiu) mostly a problem of the distribution network. The tanks themselves are rather small and even if they leak 20% of their capacity.. who cares? You still get 200+TWh storage (because H2 is more energy dense than LNG) and you shouldn’t burn it either. Just use the reverse process to get electricity back. Yes _those_ plants aren’t there yet. They will have to be build. But that’s much less of a problem (10-20 locations) than upgrading all of the distribution network and all the heaters in every building!
We will have to move away from gas-to-buildings though and that will require an upgrade in like 60% of the buildings. Industry is much less of a problem, because at the end of the day, their consumption is much less seasonally influenced (2x, rather than 10x) and only about 1/3 of total gas consumption anyways. So deal with the 2/3 block first. Then chase the rest
But the whole point is that 1) at peak solar times electricity is free (meaning wholly insufficient storage) and 2) the upfront cost of battery storage is rather prohibitive right now, while a hydrogen system is (I'd naively assume) technologically simple.
Where this comes into play is with the repeated calls for new nuclear plants - nobody in their right mind will bet against solar and battery electric storage on a 30 years timescale, and so nobody is building those.
Sure the “electricity” is free or maybe even “paid for use” a couple of short times a year. That doesn’t justify the massive capex investment needed to build a hydrogen plant that would be underutilised 95%+ of the time.
The economics will never get there. You’re railing against battery electric whilst ignoring the even bigger cost of entirely unproven hydrogen. The gas industry wants you to believe this so that we invest in hydrogen usage that for the foreseeable future will be made using gas.
Where did you get this number from for battery? All research shows that there is no such thing as moors law for batteries. Also the advancement of battery technology is highly challenging.
Anyways, batteries don't scale easily to dozens of TWh while hydrogen storage is mostly possible in gas caverns Germany already has (and provide Germany with energy in the winter)
If you assume a big enough underground salt cavern it's already cheaper to produce 1 GWh of electricity from electrolyzed hydrogen produced from solar power than it is from a nuclear power plant.
It's not a particularly meaningful milestone, just a sign of how expensive nuclear power is. There are cheaper ways to store power.
