> It technically is since natural hydrogen exists.

A pedantic point which makes little difference given how much there is and how much we need. Further, being natural makes it as renewable as natural gas.

> The problem with this logic is that renewable energy is regularly plunging to zero or even negative prices.

Renewable energy does not swing to negative prices. Their excess production causes gas, coal, and nuclear to have to go negative. Remove those from the grid and the negative price magically goes away.

And to reiterate with your point from earlier: "But just like other types of renewable energy, this is actually heading towards nearly zero."

If renewable energy costs are getting that cheap we can simply keep overbuilding them and have no need for hydrogen in the first place. The made for hydrogen is often as an energy storage for when we don't have renewables, well if the renewables are so cheap let's just build them until we don't have times where we're short electricty and then skip all the complexity of making and storing hydrogen.

> Hydrogen is significantly more valuable than the electric used to make it, even if the end goal is just make more electricity.

Black Hydrogen right now is a commodity chemical sold at 1.50 $/kg + transportation. I don't see the use cases often touted taking off. Instead I see wind, solar, hydro, and batteries eating hydrogen's potential market.

> The best way to describe it is that hydrogen is dispatchable energy, but the energy used to make it is non-dispatchable energy.

As a dispatchable energy source that requires lots of equipment and loses >70% of the energy put into the it, it's a pretty bad storage system.

> That claim is purely delusional. This is a repeat of anti-photovoltaic arguments, that solar panels could never be cheap. In reality, there are simply no substantial raw material requirements preventing either electrolyzers nor PVs from plunging in cost.

I never claimed it's about raw materials. Again, the electrolyzers are not the only equipment required, there are lots of valves, and pumps, and shit. And all of those have been mass produced for a long time. So they won't see the cost reductions that come from learning.

Solar panels went down in cost because they provided something other energy sources did not and had people willing to pay a premium to bring the cost down. Electrolyzers don't have that market right now, and by the time they get cheap enough what market will be left for them?

> Hydrogen is 10x cheaper to move around that electricity. It will be more practical to build a hydrogen infrastructure than an electrical one: https://www.brinknews.com/could-hydrogen-replace-the-need-fo...

That is an ludicrus thing to claim, especially when presenting zero evidence to back the claim.

> For economic reasons, it is much better to transport energy over long distances by molecules. When you transport hydrogen over a distance of about a thousand miles by pipeline, the costs are about half a cent per kilowatt-hour. When you do the same with electricity, it is about 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

I'd like to know how many pipelines there are that transport hydrogen that kind of distance, I'm betting on the very low single digits, if any. It's easy to make claims about the efficiency of things that exist on paper and then compare them to the reality of things actually build.

> Your article is thoroughly distorting the real story. The situation actually being described is as followed:

> > In short, it doesn't make sense to make hydrogen on the spot when you already have access to that energy and can use it directly. But this is just one scenario, and they haven't ruled out other ones.

The very next sentence is: "What we are looking at primarily is the efficiency of the cycle, to go from charging and discharging a battery and powering a truck, versus powering an electrolyser, creating hydrogen, liquefying and compressing it and then converting it back into a fuel cell."

It doesn't matter where it's made, the argument for why they don't want it doesn't change. All of those steps are there even if the hydrogen is made off-site.

> This is not a particular relevant situation for the rest of us. Very few people will have direct access to renewables in a remote area.

They will have even less access to hydrogen distribution/transmission in that case.