If PV prices continue to plummet like this, it'll become feasible to just produce hydrogen. It's not optimal that there isn't a grand plan but there are various ways how even base load can be covered through storage once it's set up
Hydrogen efficiency would have to improve ~350% to be competitive with current battery electric stored power. That’s just never going to happen, particularly as battery electric is dropping ~15% in price / becoming more efficient every year.
Battery electric is to power storage what silicon has been to chip manufacturing.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/EE/D0EE0...
Anyways, batteries don't scale easily to dozens of TWh while hydrogen storage is mostly possible in gas caverns Germany already has (and provide Germany with energy in the winter)
If you need to fill a 6 month night storage system with the sunlight from the other 6 months, instead of overproducing in summer you care about the storage being relatively stable and dense enough you don't run out of space. There may well be enough space, though at the scales that matter you'd need a lot of pipes or transmission lines depending on where you want the hydrogen powered generators, and a good electricity grid diminishes the need to store it anyway (a sufficiently good grid, 1m^2 aggregate cross section, doesn't even need any storage, because the planet is a sphere).
Given how many people react as badly to hydrogen as to nuclear, just replacing Chernobyl with the Hindenburg and a misunderstanding about hydrogen bombs, I think sufficient storage will be tricky politically even if you solve all the technical issues.
If you see a way to make it happen anyway, go for it. A plurality of solutions makes black swan correlated failures less damaging.
If only chemistry was so forgiving. The existing methane infrastructure isn't nothing, but it's also (from everything I've heard whenever this comes up) not everything either.
OTOH, I have heard hydrogen is a lot friendlier when mixed with methane, so I assume this will still be very useful when transitioning to whatever comes next.
We will have to move away from gas-to-buildings though and that will require an upgrade in like 60% of the buildings. Industry is much less of a problem, because at the end of the day, their consumption is much less seasonally influenced (2x, rather than 10x) and only about 1/3 of total gas consumption anyways. So deal with the 2/3 block first. Then chase the rest
Where this comes into play is with the repeated calls for new nuclear plants - nobody in their right mind will bet against solar and battery electric storage on a 30 years timescale, and so nobody is building those.
The economics will never get there. You’re railing against battery electric whilst ignoring the even bigger cost of entirely unproven hydrogen. The gas industry wants you to believe this so that we invest in hydrogen usage that for the foreseeable future will be made using gas.
That lie shouldn’t be repeated.
It's not a particularly meaningful milestone, just a sign of how expensive nuclear power is. There are cheaper ways to store power.
Hydrogen should aim to replace carbon intensive processes.