The difference is batteries are vastly more efficient at storage and doing useful work with that stored energy. There’s use cases where that’s fine like rocketry, but efficiency or energy density is usually a dealbreaker.
Hydrogen has also terrible volumetric energy density. It’s also really heavy until you scale to huge tanks.
Europe has enough salt formations to potentially store millions of GWh of hydrogen, far more than would be needed.
Liquifying hydrogen also costs you another ~10-13 kWh /kg where Hydrogen only contains 33kWh if you want heat, but more like 10-15kWh/kg if you want to do useful work. So you’re roughly paying double the energy for the same amount of energy stored.
Hydrogen is generally considered a storage, not a resource. Same as battery.
There’s a huge demand for hydrogen in industry and it’s almost exclusively met with steam methane reforming there’s some methane pyrolysis and a little green hydrogen but not much. If people could just drill for it, they would happier do so as being so light it’s easy to separate out from other gasses.
This is not necessarily true. A recent discovery in France could contain as much as 250 million metric tons of hydrogen (but that's a generous upper bound).
We’re talking about the useful energy from ~1 number power plant over its lifespan. So find ~1,000 such locations and that would be a big deal.
It's not clear what would be available globally if it were looked for as it was in France.
What do you think people mean when they say "electric" in this context? It's batteries.