Not a small order.

Honestly, this sounds just as bad as setting up bitcoin mines in places with high rates of renewables, to avoid directly throwing tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. Even if you have loads of clean energy, that's no reason to waste it when there are more efficient ways of using it (lithium batteries, PoS).

Not to mention the fact that every watt of wasted green energy can't used to replace a watt of coal energy.

No need if the Icelink DC link gets built. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelink

EVs are well suited to light loads and short distances, rapid acceleration and altitude change but are not well suited to long range hauling of heavy loads due to the enormous energy required.

The only open question is: can you put enough batteries into a battery electric semi? If you can't, then of course the question about efficiency is moot. But if you can, everything speaks for battery electric vehicles. That is where the Tesla Semi comes into play. It promises ranges that are just enough for most applications, for those applications it has basically "won" right from the start. What remains to be seen is how large exactly the sector is which isn't served by the Semi. But in any case, with every improvement of the battery technology, that sector shrinks a bit further.

I grew up in the UK with electric milk floats, a practical use of EV's for short, quiet urban delivery. There's a reason electric heavy trucks, which were marketed in the 20's and 30's lost out to diesel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Electric_Truck

Also for an 18 wheeler just the amount of tires on the road requires tremendous torque to create a rolling load and sustain it. Freightliner are working hard to make E trucks viable but the acid test is fleet buyers and maintenance, it's a ruthlessly efficiency first market. https://freightliner.com/electric-trucks/

For displacing existing grey hydrogen from the chemical industry, a possible reducing agent in steel making, and other high temperature industrial processes it's pretty clear that the answer will be yes.

I happen to think that it is really unlikely that the answer for cars and vans will ever be yes, even if hydrogen could be made cheaply.

Whether it will have a role in other applications depends on a few things:

First, the structure of the future electricity mix. In order to ensure that there is enough electricity at every moment, we have to do a mix of things: -"over" build variable output renewables so that the troughs in production are higher -Intra-day demand side response -Intra-day storage (almost certainly batteries) -Dispatchable renewables like hydro -Dispatchable sort-of renewables based on biomass -Dispatchable fossil fuels (with CCS) -Load-following nuclear

The reason why people think about hydrogen and other exotic technologies is that many of the technologies on that list either have limited available scope (hydro, biomass), are probably not really carbon-neutral (biomass, CCS), rely on unproven tech at scale (CCS, new nuclear designs), or have exceptionally high capital costs (any new nuclear but especially when at low load factors, CCS especially at low load factors).

So what most simulations show you're left with as a low-cost mix for most days is a combination of the first five. That still leaves you with two problems: -What do you do if the average output net of load is very different between seasons? -How do you provision for a 1:20 yr weather system without making your system vastly more expensive?

and one opportunity (which is also a challenge): -variable renewables are cheap and getting cheaper so cost-optimal generation mixes build a lot more than needed for the average day in order to keep use of expensive biomass and limited hydro capacity to a minimum. As a result, electricity has low/no marginal value a lot of the time.

Second, the future cost of electrolysers. At current capex levels, they need to be run at max load all the time and still produce expensive hydrogen. Genuinely low costs like what BNEF thinks might be possible ($100/kW) allow you to run for only 20% or less of the hours in the year and scoop all the excess electricity up.

Third, the cost of alternative solutions in the areas where hydrogen is currently being considered as this reduces the value of any hydrogen produced.

I do agree that for passenger cars it's just not going to happen.

If I wanted to do this with my hydrogen car, I would need to get some expensive electrolysis station next to my house and I would get maybe 50% of stored energy back after electrolysis. I would also need to get the compressor etc maintained regularly.

Also, if you mean storage for actual driving, as in possible range, there's hardly a need for more range than a Tesla can already deliver... For most people. The biggest change to make it more feasible for pretty much all people is charging speed and that keeps improving too.