Isn't it infinitely more efficient than just letting the potential power be wasted? If supply surpasses demand eventually wind farms are shut down. That has to change, IMHO.

> How efficient is making hydrogen?

https://www.iea.org/reports/electrolysers

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...

Yeah, we need to generate a lot of green hydrogen anyway, to decarbonise fertilizer, steel production, aviation fuel and a bunch of other stuff (Ideally we'd force fossil fuel producers, the number one users of hydrogen today, to replace their hydrogen with green hydrogen as part of the process of kick starting this).

And in that world, using some of your stored hydrogen or ammonia as emergy reserve makes sense, though you'd want to avoid actually using it too much as if you do then you'd probably have been better spending the money on more generation and/or batteries.

Industrial electrolysis is roughly 70% efficient. Generating electricity from it with a fuel cell is about 40%-60% efficient. There are (realistic) newer approaches to improve on this (up to 85% for fuel cells). And yes, it’s infinitely better than nothing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell