No, I'm not being disingenuous at all. The reason hydrogen products dont make it to market is the same reason you hear about some new battery tech, and then never hear about it again: it's promising, but it either doesnt work economically or there are unresolved issues.

You say hydrogen works better than li-ion grid scale storage.. but there are more batteries being used for that than hydrogen today. Hydrogen demonstration systems are 20-45% efficient, meaning it's hard to compete on price (assuming the issues are worked out). The other type uses massive salt caverns for storage, and those are limited by the number of suitable sites.. just like pumped hydro.. so they'll always be niche applications.

It's not some conspiracy. Utility companies buy energy storage systems based on cost/efficiency. Hydrogen systems aren't in that mix today because they aren't efficient enough or because they have some issue that prevents them being put into products. That's it. There's the whole problem. Hydrogen hasnt passed that minimal bar required to make a real utility scale energy storage product.

Li-ion may or may not be (one of) the solutions for most grid scale storage.. but until hydrogen comes way down on cost and more issues are resolved, it's not going to be the answer at all. All of this "hydrogen is better for X" is currently a fantasy based on lab promises.

Will not the H2 tanks scale better than batteries for large scale storage?

Battery capacity scales linearly (n) to material requirements , while a gas tank's capacity scales quadrically to material requirements (n^2, because of only using a surface of materials to store a volume).

I'd also assume the energy required to keep the tank cold relatively lower as the tanks gets larger.

Why keep it cold? Just fill an enormous balloon...

Seems like only a few years ago people were saying that battery powered cars weren't possible, you'd never be able to fit a big enough battery in there, they'd never have the range, weigh too much, be too expensive...

> weigh too much

This is still a problem we'll have to face. Road tear and wear grows exponentially with weight, and tire pollution (both noise and particles) is also nothing to be disregarded.

Also batteries require all sorts of raw materials with problematic provenance (e.g. lithium mines destroy the nearby environment, cobalt comes from child labour in terrible conditions, etc.). Cars with batteries are better than cars with internal combustion engines, but still expensive, inefficient, polluting and wasteful as the main means of transportation of every human being on the planet.

> Road tear and wear grows exponentially with weight

Road wear actually grows with the 4th power of weight, not the weight in the exponent, but that is a really bad argument regardless because trucks exist.

> Road tear and wear grows exponentially with weight

I thought something like 90%+ of road wear and tear was due to tractor trailers, dump trucks, and other massive vehicles. Meanwhile cars were a rounding error. Do EVs change that?

99%+. So, no.

Which does not change the fact, that mining and refining of raw materials to make batteries so you can repeat the cycle again in 10 years does not scale as making steel tanks.

100+ years ago someone in France build a tunnel for horse and carriage with a propeller and a steam engine on both ends. The tunnel went down at the start helping acceleration and up at the end to slow the cart down.

It might not be incredibly fast or even useful it does show we don't need to put the engine on the vehicle (entirely)

I just imagined a hilarious contraption using slow moving water in a canal. A screw is inserted in the stream driven by a wheel on the road. As long as the speed at which the road moves is different from the speed of the water you can keep extracting more speed from the flow. (haha)