> And there's the potential for buffering excess renewable energy. for now this problem can largely be solved by improving the electricity transmission infrastr

> And there's the potential for buffering excess renewable energy. for now this problem can largely be solved by improving the electricity transmission infrastructure between countries, but it's unclear to me that this is sufficient in the long run. Well that is just another way to say 'battery'. If hydrogen is the 'right' solution for this is also highly questionable. Storing large amounts of hydrogen is not easy. Hydrogen fuel-cells and electrolysers are not very cheap and you need to scale vertically if you want to be able to consume high amounts of power in both directions. In addition, that whole stack makes it overall very inefficient. The only real benefit compared to a battery is that its easier to scale hydrogen tank then battery materials. However, there are other potential solution. A 'liquid air' battery, meaning liquidity air and on demand drive turbine, has better energy efficiency is more proven technology at large scale and has the same advantage of making bigger tanks result in larger storage. Flow batteries potentially can do the same thing as well. All that said, it seems to me that LFP (Iron Phosphate) based batteries will beat all of them once the production is fully going. LFP has very low material cost, and has a very long life and is very safe. One of the issues with chemical storage from 'leftover' renewable is that your energy consumers will have very low utility and your plant will run at very low overall utilisation. This is less of a problem with a LFP based chemical battery.