The deal with hydrogen is that electrolyzers cost a lot of money & round trip efficiency is bad anyway, so you’ll want battery storage for daily cycling and a c

The deal with hydrogen is that electrolyzers cost a lot of money & round trip efficiency is bad anyway, so you’ll want battery storage for daily cycling and a combination of solar, wind, and good distribution. A small amount of curtailment is fine, in fact most power plants don’t operate 24/7 even when fuel is cheap, and you could consider that “curtailment,” too, but it’s just accepted that it’s okay to idle a power plant if it’s output isn’t needed (the only difference with solar and wind is their fuel is free). But once you use batteries and good distribution, there isn’t much curtailment needed. Hydrogen electrolyzers just using “free” electricity 5% of the time is crazy expensive… it’s 20 times as expensive (from a capital standpoint) as running 24/7. And all of this is fine until we get to ~95% clean/renewable grids. Maybe at that point it’d be worth using hydrogen fir seasonal storage. But even then, you’ll still have some curtailment because otherwise your electrolyzer is too expensive. Check out https://model.energy https://model.energy for how this would work.