If you recall from my original post, I said nothing about that hypothetical, abundant hydrogen being born from any particular source, but I did have solar in mind specifically. I personally think solar cells and panel arrays will get more efficient at producing power that we will eventually have a global excess. If we have grids producing renewable electricity when conditions allow, they can redirect some of the excess energy and use electrolysis to produce hydrogen creating energy reserves for when the power source is not available to them.
Hydrogen is still not super efficient because we have not even scratched the surface of optimizing it’s consumption. If we had concerted efforts towards that goal, we can get it to work for us in ways we never thought possible. I don’t think lugging around large batteries is the future, rather our fuel storage needs will be met by hydrogen tanks.
This is a optimistic scenario. Current trend is mostly linear. See:
Wind power generation, world: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wind-generation?tab=chart...
Solar power generation, world: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption?...
You can choose linear/log, it doesn't look exponential to me.
Add to this the fact that primary energy generation is increasing all over the world, so the share of renewables is increasing even less.
The target is 2050. There is no R&D that will get rid of electrolysis and Carnot cycles by then. Maybe by the end of the century if you want. But for the next 30 years, batteries will be in the lead.
Total renewables = 20.1%, that includes hydro which may not be as renewable as we thought.
Just had this discussion but relative to why not re-invest in nuclear so we looked up the amount of nuclear energy (~20%).
Not sure if we are looking at different sources, they are counted differently, etc.
Source for this is; https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
It is not even 3 decades to 2050, which is the USA's target date for net zero carbon, so with conservative estimates primary energy from wind should increase by at least 10% per decade, so 4 times faster than last decade.
Where is the vast abundance of renewable energy that you are talking about? Now is not the time for deploying another massively wasteful technology just because some people want to go on road trips without taking a 30 min break (a recent EV fast charge does not take hours) every few hours.