Seems like we're going to need to become more diurnal and more seasonal in our approach to industry? Make hay while the sun shines, as the idiom says.
Hydrogen is hard to store, but there is sufficient space for satisfying most of our needs by itself. Hydrogen generators are also mostly made of iron, carbon, and aluminum, or alternatively a lot of organic chemicals and aluminum.
Pumped hydro has some problems to compete on the open market, but it also can satisfy most of our storage requirements by itself. Pumped hydro systems are made mostly of steel.
What kinds of resources do you expect we to run out of?
If the thesis is that electrical energy will be hyper abundant 80% of the time and deeply scarce the remaining 20% (which is the case if you use only solar and wind) and that periods of scarcity are correlated - so a "bad" day is likely to be preceded and followed by other "bad" days, then large scale hydrogen storage is quite a good match to get you through your worst week.
Yes, salt domes are quite viable. They are more the "expensive" kind of storage, and require a lot of scale. They are probably not economically viable for electricity storage as it's usually understood, but they are cheap enough that it's perfectly viable to dig them at a loss for societal assurance. They are certainly a lesser drag on the economy than nuclear power.
AFAIK the vast majority of depleted gas fields can't be used for hydrogen storage. The ones that can are obviously a major gain, but those aren't enough to sustain a society.
Storing hydrogen is perfectly viable, and won't have any catastrophic impact on electricity prices. But the "extremely easy" is a bit too optimistic.
I'm confident we'll get there. There will be lots of mitigating the damage from climate change, because that train wreck is still in motion. But we will mostly decarbonize our economies by the end of this century.
Unfortunately unless we completely decarbonize by the middle of the century, we'll reach catastrophic levels of global warming (>3 degrees warming, likely leading to the polar ice caps melting and significant ocean level rises, especially at the equator).
3 degrees is very bad, but it's quite survivable. We can of course always do better. But right now I'm quite happy with the direction things are going and the current trends but still push for trying to do more where we can.
A goal, which it is now clear, that would have been absolutely trivial to meet while making a solid profit on the deal, if we'd just started earlier, like when the problem became widely known four decades ago.
But we didn't. So we can probably still do it, and we can probably still come out richer, but some people are still trying to slow it down so they can profit from the short term chaos and impoverishing and risking our lives to do so.
There was a wide array of solutions available 40 years ago, including, but not limited to nuclear.
Notable mentions: carbon fees, preventing deforestation, not subsidizing fossil fuels, not actively encouraging methane release from oilfields, more efficient cars, trains, insulation, heat pumps and soar water heaters but really the list is very, very long.
Agreed, but that was the part that could be addressed with nuclear.
> There was a wide array of solutions available 40 years ago, including, but not limited to nuclear.
I think we're in agreement, except for the word "solution". The things you mention are not solutions, but rather mitigations, bandaids, things that slow the pace of climate change. Which still would have been extremely useful to buy us more time to decarbonize.
We emitted what the eartg can absorb (3Gteq) back in 1990. Since then, emissions trippled.
Net zero is not enough, there is still a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere, so the temperature will reach +3°C.
Assuming we follow that plan and don't hit any tipping points, we should stay under 3C, but yeah it's possible.
It's going to come down to mitigating, and that might mean different things in different places.
I think there will be some amount of geo-engineering to cool the poles and avoid some of the sea level rise and permafrost melting. There will also be some active carbon removal, but we also will not reach zero emissions either. That may mostly balance out, or reach "net zero".
There will also likely be a slow migration away from low lying coastal areas, as well as seawall construction.
We have already seen a little bit of this. It's only been a preview of what a more serious revolt would look like.
It's important to realize that anything that increases energy costs is regressive. The wealthy can afford these cost increases and their lifestyle is barely impacted. For the poor and working class increases in these costs can be absolutely devastating.
The upper classes can also afford EVs, solar panels, batteries, and can very often telework at least some of the time. Working classes are stuck with older technology that is more expensive to fuel and generally have to commute to work jobs in person with no option for remote work.
From my perspective people hate democracy and want people to be unequal by birth.
Maybe I'm cynical, but the observer who said that the problem with political power is that the worst people will do anything they can to take it (as a result, good people won't have it)
Solar and batteries are still rapidly dropping in price. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry is engaging in rampant hostage taking (Putin) and price gouging (oil is under $100/barrel. Why is gasoline 2x what it was the first time oil was at this price?)
If anything, I’d expect decentralized generation of renewable power to stabilize energy costs, eliminate wars for oil, and create well paying jobs for unskilled labor.
As for EV affordability: All EVs in the US have a 10 year battery warranty (or lose subsidies), which should create gluts in the used car market moving forward.
All of those things help the poor and working class: lower, more stable energy prices, better jobs, fewer wars to fight and cheaper used cars are each individually huge wins.
And overall, the lifetime environmental impact of solar panels is much lower than producing the same energy using fossile fuels.
Right now it seems that the social contract is "give up your autonomy and stability to capitalism and in return you get to consume lots of stuff". If we remove the "consume lots of stuff" part of the equation, then I doubt people would be happy with the "give up your autonomy and stability" part.