If you truly cared about energy efficiency you'd proposition the ban or severe limitation of private car usage in sufficiency dense localities. Public trams and busses, cycling, walking, and maybe even very small private vehicles would be extremely more energy efficient.
There is nothing about a 5-ton EV SUV that says energy efficiency.
Now, you have to acknowledge the world we live in, a total ban won't be feasible in the time-frame that we have to combat climate change. (And neither will an electric grid sufficiently powerful to power millions of green hydrogen-powered vehicles or 5-ton SUVs for that matter).
Not all EVs weigh 5 tons. Promoting (smaller) EVs for people who need them is a good thing.
Guess what, if you get a BEV with 1/3-1/4 the battery size, the range is smaller, but for most people it will be fine. And now your vehicle is not lugging around all that excess weight.
And do you really need a massive electric pickup truck? It's absolutely possible, but I bet for most people it's a preference.
Utility-scale users of solar will naturally install electrolysers for the additional revenue stream, using generation in excess of immediate need after local storage is charged up. They will favor the cheapest equipment, disregarding efficiency, because of their intermittent utilization. Nobody will be able to compete with them, because the power they use will be wholly free (i.e. "zero marginal cost"). The market for electrolysed H2, and NH3 produced from it, will be unlimited.
Solar farms not producing H2 will find themselves undercut by those that are.
Long-term energy storage will not be a thing, because any need beyond a few days will be satisfied by shipments of LNH3 from tropical producers.
It will take time for all this to settle out. Expect to see a lot of short-term adaptations.
Hydrogen (and explosive gas which is notorious difficult to transport and work with safely) is neither efficient nor convenient.
Efficiency gains generally lead to lower cost, which in turn lead to higher demand. And this increased demand can very well be in excess of the efficiency gain.
This was observed as early as the 1860ies and theorized in concepts like the Jevons Paradox/Rebound Effect.
This doesn't mean efficiency gains are not desirable, but they must be implemented in conjunction with other factors like environmental policies.
But regarding your example, personally, I'm actually kind of "keep adding light bulbs" thanks to LEDs. I'm no longer using one central 75W incandescent bulb per room, but rather 4 or 5 Philips Hue lights (bulbs & led strips) in an indirect fashion. Hue bulbs & these new usages would not have existed without the LED efficiency gains.
This counter example, of course, has many flaws, firstly, it's only my specific situation, not an average case. The efficiency gains (energy and longevity) is only part of what enabled these new types of lights. And lastly, I think my energy consumption is still lower non-the-less. But it demonstrate how things might not be so clear cut.
> In the early 1900s, gas was less efficient than electricity too
I think you mean gasoline instead of just gas. Hydrogen requires huge amounts of energy before it's easy to transport, which is what you responded to. In any case, in the early 1900s, gasoline had a huge amount of stored energy. It was a matter of using it efficiently, you're comparing apples to oranges. With Green Hydrogren too often people say that some technological improvement will solve the drawbacks. While ignoring that for e.g. hydrogen it's not so easy, for other options it is/was.
Same for the often suggested "solution" of using surplus energy. A factory that doesn't work 24/7 is more costly. Aside from that I understood that hydrogen is best produced continuously for it to be efficient.
It doesn't have nearly as much impact as other factors, such as abundance of the material, how easy/practical it is to work with it (which influences both demand and supply), whether mass infrastructure for it already exists (although this is more relevant in the short-term rather than long-term), etc.
These factors impact the economics of an energy source much more than efficiency, and economics is by far the most important factor in deciding whether an energy source will be used or not (and how much of it), not efficiency.
e.g. if hydrogen is only 10% efficient but there's 10 times more of it on Earth compared to a similar energy source that is 90% efficient, then hydrogen wins (all other factors being equal).
As another example, if hydrogen tanks in cars explode 100 times as often as gas tanks, then it would probably be a complete non-starter for powering vehicles, regardless of efficiency.
If you need need to build out a grid to power your cars, you'll 3x as much energy at the source to get the same amount of energy into the tyres.
3 x 10 cents, which could represent a fixed amount of an abundant and easy-to-work-with energy source (therefore cheap) which has 33% efficiency (hence the 3x cost factor), still costs much less than say, 1 x 5 dollars, which might represent the same amount of energy provided by a scarce and/or hard-to-work-with energy source (therefore expensive), even if this energy source is 99.999% efficient (hence the 1x factor).
As an analogy, let's say you live in a community on an isolated island and you need to eat.
You can satisfy your hunger / nutrient / energy requirements with 1 coconut or with 5 apples (which means we're assuming one apple is only 1/5th as nutritious/efficient as one coconut in this example).
Which fruit serving will be cheaper? You can argue "if you eat apples you will need 5x more of them, therefore they will be more expensive!".
But of course, that might not matter one bit.
The problem is that maybe on the island there might only be 10 (reachable) coconuts but there might be 10,000 reachable apples, so the 5 apples would be much, much cheaper than 1 coconut.
Or perhaps there are also 10,000 coconuts but there are no knives on this island so they would be very hard to open and eat. Therefore you wouldn't be able to find coconuts at the market because nobody would want to pick them and sell them, since nobody would want to buy them despite everybody wanting to eat fruit every day.
Not in the way that you think, no. For all intents and purposes, we have limitless energy. The problem was never that we don't have enough capacity, because we can scale capacity as much as we want. The only thing that is required is that energy generation (i.e. $/kWh) is cheap enough, and this seems feasible with solar and wind and maybe fission and later one fusion or other sources.
>you're comparing apples to oranges
You are the one saying, "just attach a transmission line to it" or "just put a battery in it", without thinking of all the cases where this is just not possible.
Nobody is arguing that you should start powering your toaster with hydrogen. You all are attacking a strawman, it seems.