The article you cited is just a person trying to, from purely an a priori standpoint, determine what is possible based on how things currently are. At no point

The article you cited is just a person trying to, from purely an a priori standpoint, determine what is possible based on how things currently are. At no point does he try to imagine where the technology will be or where society will be in 10-30 years time. The most damning parts are where he predicts that hydrogen will fail to hit its cost targets even decades from now. That's completely in opposition to nearly every other green energy program tried recently, and I think reveals his lack of foresight. I think the only valid point he made is that electricity is more efficient in a lot of circumstances. But we already knew that, and in fact it's arguably not worth pursuing in a world that will be soon awashed in green energy. Plus, all of the other problems unrelated to efficiency look devastatingly hard if our goal is to have a pure zero emissions world. Ultimately, it's exactly what Arthur Clarke warned us about regarding old people making predictions. So no, this not a "clear headed" analysis but arguably a document of luddite thinking. > Switching pipelines to hydrogen has huge, unsolved problems. The energy density is far lower, meaning that even with current demand, natural gas pipelines repurposed to hydrogen would be inadequate. Already, building new pipelines for NG is so difficult that LNG storage is deployed to relieve congestion. Hydrogen would make that far worse. And there are many small things, like making the pipelines robust to the damaging effects of hydrogen, and even coming up with some sort of odorant like the mercapten in natural gas; we don't have any chemicals that can work at the moment. We've been piping hydrogen for decades, so this is mostly a solved problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_pipeline_transport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_pipeline_transport Hydrogen will only mean larger tanks and bigger pipes compared to natural gas. This is a vast improvement over batteries or other physically based energy storage, which are dozens to hundreds of times less energy dense. You can easily figure out that the latter cases would be truly enormous in comparison, not to mention needing something much more complicated than just underground caverns. Furthermore, there's no practical way of moving electricity across oceans. I mean yes, you can build HVDC underwater and that works to some extent, but it quickly becomes ridiculously expensive if you try to connect distant landmasses in a giant web of connected grids. With hydrogen, you are looking at shipping hydrogen like LNG. At a basic level, you're looking at a grid that works just like the existing one, only much cleaner and slightly more expensive. Only difference this time you can put the fuel cells very close to the end-customer since there are no CO2 or NOx emissions. This nearly eliminates the need for giant overhead powerlines, itself a major benefit. Compared to the vast complexity of what we're seeing with the "macrogrid" this looks very doable.