>That’s really weird comparison to say “it’s been cheaper since new technology didn’t exist”… well of course.

It's still cheaper today. HVDC might eventually be cheaper, but that isn't the reality right now. Hence, your argument for batteries and electricity being the more scalable option is factually incorrect. We use other vectors for transporting energy long distances -- ones that scale more effectively -- and then we convert it to the form needed at the point of use. Why is this important? Because...

>my whole point was you don’t need to transport energy (plug a big solar panel into a car), to which you responded by saying transporting energy is inefficient???

You effectively always need to transport energy to the point of use, whether the transport vector is as electricity through a cable, or fuel in a pipe. Different methods come with different trade-offs. Electricity is good for relatively short distances, because it's typically hard to store for long periods (relative to energy stored in chemical bonds, for example), and is better used as it's generated. This is why we use oil and gas pipelines in the first place; if electricity were a better vector for long-range energy transport, we would use it as such. But we don't, because it's not the right tool for the job.

>Batteries 100% scale better than gas, you don’t need gas stations and we already have electricity running across our cities.

Except they demonstrably don't. We have a billion cars on the road, the vast majority of which use gas. We use the same stuff to run ships and planes, and we even use it as a chemical feedstock to make fertilizer to grow the food we eat. Acting like batteries scale better than fossil fuels, when not everyone has a place to park and charge their car overnight, is a fairly insular take. BEVs don't even meet all of the use cases that standard cars and trucks currently do, and that's before getting into all of the other transport applications that fossil fuels enable. No one is trucking goods across the Nullarbor in a battery electric truck any time soon.

And to be clear I'm not saying that we don't need to get off of fossil fuels, or that batteries aren't part of the solution -- rather, I'm saying that scalability matters, and we shouldn't pretend like batteries have anything even approaching the scalability of fossil fuels, because it blinds us to the bigger picture. They don't, for many reasons, which is why it'll take multiple solutions working in tandem to fill the voids left behind when we inevitably move away from fossil fuels.

>I’m not sure where salt cavern hydrogen came from…

You mentioned battery storage when talking about scalability.

On a grid level, scalable energy storage is being able to add 100GWh at a time through a salt cavern, not 500MWh batteries here and there. Batteries have a place, but they're mostly load shifting on short time scales, and don't scale to the size of a grid. You can't use batteries to smooth out weather patterns that can last for weeks, and it's probable we never will. We have more scalable solutions for that.

At the transport level, scalability means low cost, high endurance, and low downtime; batteries can only make tenuous claims for any of these, and are still outclassed by fossil fuels. We'll see how it shakes out in the future, but let's not count our chickens before they've hatched.