Comment Re:So, the plan is ... (Score 1) 76
Because maybe you are thinking in storage LOTS of energy?
Think about it. A battery is amortized with usage. You have a range of batteries, but usually the best for BES is very stable batteries that can support 5.000-10.000 cycles.
So even if they battery + infrastructure costs you 300 $ per kwh, each cycle depends on
150/10.000 = 0,03 $/kwh cycled. Cheap enough.
But... how much time takes to do 10.000 cycles?
If you do a cycle per day, that's 10.000 days or around 27 years. Let's round to 30. Still reasonable.
But you only have one season change per year. Amortize on 10.000 years?. Hell, no.
What you need is a technology that decouples power and energy. In hydrogen the energy stored is managed by the storage/tank/underground reserve, while the power is managed by the fuel cell/electrolyzer.
So you can have a giant tank of one or two months of consumption, while you only have some megawatts of power. The storage can have gigawatts hour of energy inside.
If you want gigawatts hour of storage, you need gigawatts hour of batteries, to just use them one cycle per year.
Hydrogen is a lot cheaper for seasonal storage, while batteries are way better than hydrogen in daily cycling.
So both have sense for different scenarios.