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The point is that if you just look at cost of hydrogen equipment, you're missing the cost of the equipment that has to charge it as well. Have you read Komanof

The point is that if you just look at cost of hydrogen equipment, you're missing the cost of the equipment that has to charge it as well. Have you read Komanoff's hypothesis that any given energy technology's cost scales to first order with sector size? It's quite an argument. He used it to explain unrelated cost escalations in nuclear and coal. It says that the bigger a sector is, the more people are impacted, and the more regulations and other externalities come in. For wind and solar, you can imagine land use leading to more NIMBY and transmission costs, and increasing costs of dealing with high intermittency (e.g. 2-week long wind droughts across 4 huge states that regularly occur in January).

pfdietz 3y ago
Ah, but the equipment to charge it is the renewable sources you're already building. These are installed with some overcapacity, so they can more often provide what they're required to provide directly to the grid. But this means they also produce excess output, which can then be diverted to hydrogen production. One gets two bites at the apple here; the two approaches are synergistic with overall cost less than the sum of the costs of each separately. As I have repeatedly pointed out, simulations based on actual weather data show green hydrogen can be highly effective at reducing the overall cost of a RE grid, vs. just using batteries alone.