You're making it right now.
> If you haven't seen "any real plan" that just reflects your disinterest in seeing such a plan.
No. I did a full literature search and I read most of the articles in that area.
> There is nothing preventing this from being applied to Europe. All the technologies are available. It's just a matter of integrating existing capabilities, which is the surest kind of innovation.
What is "this"?
> No pipeline upgrades are needed for hydrogen for grid storage, since there's no need to move hydrogen away from the storage caverns. It can be created and consumed there.
The thing is, most of German storage is in the northern part (Rehden, Etzel, Epe, etc) due to geology. That's not where the consumers are, so you need to build a huge amount of power lines.
To give you a perspective, a fairly typical natural gas pipeline can transfer around 1 Bcf of gas per day, which translates to about 12GW of power. This is the same as the largest ultra-high-voltage direct current (UHVDC) line in the world (in Brazil), built at the cost of around $2.5B for 2400 km.
And you'll need many, many such lines to transfer power from the points of generation and consumption to the hydrogen hubs. This is in addition to already expensive hydrogen production and gas turbines.
I don't see this ever becoming cost-competitive with plain old PWRs.
There is nothing preventing this from being applied to Europe. All the technologies are available. It's just a matter of integrating existing capabilities, which is the surest kind of innovation.
No pipeline upgrades are needed for hydrogen for grid storage, since there's no need to move hydrogen away from the storage caverns. It can be created and consumed there. It could be useful to build pipelines, of course, but it isn't necessary. I am NOT suggesting using hydrogen to replace natural gas in distributed applications.
Power-to-natural-gas has the problem of where does the carbon come from. CO2 capture (either from the atmosphere, or from the exhaust of the CC plants) would add to cost, and then the CO2 needs to be stored also. And, the round trip efficiency will be considerably below that of hydrogen. Power-to-liquid fuels would make more sense; it doesn't cost that much more to turn CO2 + H2 into such fuels instead of to methane. Liquid fuels (normally for air or ship transportation, for example) could also serve as a rare event backstop along with hydrogen, for once-in-a-century events, as long as the CC plants can burn both.