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I disagree. I'm a proponent of the Electrify Everything movement, and I'm convinced it's going to be cheaper for 90% of the economy than burning fossil fuels is, within two decades.
You want green hydrogen for two things: blast furnaces for virgin steel (steel from iron ore, not from scrap) and cement kilns for concrete. Both processes will be difficult to electrify without hydrogen. The rest of what you're saying is true, of course. You only ever store hydrogen if you have access to a subterran salt cavern - because then its economical to run the electrolyzers when electricity is cheap, and make steel/cement 24/7. In all other cases, you just make the hydrogen on demand, and you throttle down production if electricity gets temporarily expensive.
If you have a truly gigantic salt cavern (those exist) and most countries in the west continue to refuse reforming their nuclear regulations, you might be doing seasonal energy storage on the side. Because in a future grid without nuclear, the renewables will need to be at least 30% overbuilt, which means you have zero cost electricity for months. In that case, adding a few GW of gas turbines or fuel cells to your steel/concrete plant might be worth it, even if you only run them during the yearly dunkelflaute.
Electrification is all well and good (clean air!) but why go to such a great effort in steel and cement? The capital base using coke/thermal coal is already there and paid for. There's 70-100 years of coke left, probably more if we look harder.
It just seems like an inefficient use of resources. Why would we even want to overbuild our electricity sector by 30% and have all this surplus/deficit in power? Just build more nuclear plants when we need more energy, keep them running 95% of the time and then switch over to fusion power. Keep using coke where needed, counter CO2 emissions with sulphate aerosols.
I guess it makes sense if the 'solar power is going to make energy insanely, ludicrously cheap' argument comes true. But they've been saying this for ages. It hasn't happened. We've been told that solar power is incredibly cheap, yet electricity prices have been rising even as we build more and more solar. I live in Australia. We're not short of solar potential! I think the whole narrative is an illusion. Actually cheap energy sources have high uptime and reliability - coal, gas, nuclear, hydro. I'm not aware of any major country whose electricity prices have fallen as a result of a transition to renewables.
Steel is 7% of global CO2 emissions, cement is 6%. And both are actually easier to electrify than agriculture, ocean shipping and jet flight - each also single digit percentage points of global emissions.
So if we stop short of steel and cement, we're so very much short of Everything, we might as well just give up and accept that global warming will be a continuous process that only stops after human civilization ends. I'm not yet willing to accept doomerism of that kind, I'd much rather build great things - which needs more steel and cement, meaning we need to electrify it in the field as soon as it begins to be cost competitive.
I share your frustrations, but I've been waiting for a reform of nuclear regulations for decades now. It's not going to happen, middling public support and close to zero political will across the aisle. We just can't do it, and now it's too late. Even regulatory nuclear revolution followed by a Manhattan project 2.0 would not make nuclear in any way relevant in the west. The timelines are too long and renewables+batteries have full industrial momentum now.
France, South Korea and China had the political will 30 years ago, and thus have momentum now, but nobody else does.
It has happened for everybody who bought solar cells. Investments in rooftop solar amortize in 5-10 years, after that it's pure profit/free power.
The rest will follow with cheap batteries. Technologically, we could roll out vehicle to grid today, and connect several TWh of batteries to the grid. Grid scale batteries are economical today, you just need to wait in the grid interconnection queue for a year or two until you can get your GW connections approved. It's happening right now, and it will only get faster from here. The price is right now, and shortly the full force of capitalism will do the rest.
Consumer prices might not follow, of course. Lots of monopolies, stupid regulations, lots of new investments...
Good points. In my mind I guess I conceptualize civilization as an accelerationist project that is going to end up reshaping or disassembling the world one way or another, so why bother with greenhouse gas emissions? We'll end up paving the Antarctic and Arctic with datacentres, heating the world with sheer mass of industry, turning wilderness into parkland... Like it or not we've subjugated nearly all land mammal biomass and we're moving in on the oceans. Why try to arrest the transformation now? It is our destiny...
If you've ever read the Keys to the Kingdom series, a major part of it is Arthur trying to preserve his humanity from the sorcerous power of the keys. He takes all these risks and limitations on his power, trying to stay mortal. But in the end he becomes a 12 foot tall winged immortal Denizen anyway, he is the Chosen One after all. The impulse to retain humanity in the face of general superiority always seemed strange to me, though I accept my opinion must be in the minority there and in ecology/climate too.
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