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Hydrogen is extremely easy to store underground. It is expensive to make (i.e. inefficient and capital intensive) and to move around with compressors but actual

Hydrogen is extremely easy to store underground. It is expensive to make (i.e. inefficient and capital intensive) and to move around with compressors but actually storing it if you have access to salt domes and depleted gas fields is not hard at all. If the thesis is that electrical energy will be hyper abundant 80% of the time and deeply scarce the remaining 20% (which is the case if you use only solar and wind) and that periods of scarcity are correlated - so a "bad" day is likely to be preceded and followed by other "bad" days, then large scale hydrogen storage is quite a good match to get you through your worst week.

marcosdumay 4y ago
"Extremely" is really not a good way to describe it. Yes, salt domes are quite viable. They are more the "expensive" kind of storage, and require a lot of scale. They are probably not economically viable for electricity storage as it's usually understood, but they are cheap enough that it's perfectly viable to dig them at a loss for societal assurance. They are certainly a lesser drag on the economy than nuclear power. AFAIK the vast majority of depleted gas fields can't be used for hydrogen storage. The ones that can are obviously a major gain, but those aren't enough to sustain a society. Storing hydrogen is perfectly viable, and won't have any catastrophic impact on electricity prices. But the "extremely easy" is a bit too optimistic.