> Storage is a completely separate axis to generation
It’s not when you can generate on demand from a fuel source that doubles as energy storage.
The overall faction from all fossil fuels has also declined, in the proportion I would expect from the current deployment of the various alternatives: https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-states#what...
> It’s not when you can generate on demand from a fuel source that doubles as energy storage.
It is when your fuel tanks are finite in size.
Also we can't generate fuel yet at sufficient scale, and that's just as relevant regarding hydrogen as it is about batteries for electricity storage.
I'm optimistic about batteries, but that optimism is realistically that we'll get there over the coming decade, and in the meantime have to deal with naysayers who can't imagine a future different to the past.
With hydrogen, I'm pessimistic. Given that hydrogen electrolysis is so easy that I did this before I turned 10, you need to wonder why the USA (and all the other targets of the fuel embargo) failed to do this in any significant level even at the height of the 1970s fuel crisis back when nuclear power was still fashionable.
This isn't an unanswerable question, nor is intended to be anti-hydrogen rhetoric — if you can solve the problems that made it unviable back then, that's fantastic and we can use it now.
But we do actually have to solve those problems.
This doesn't mean green hydrogen can't work, any more than the large amount of local air pollution before the passage of the Clean Air Act meant air pollution was impossible to control. It's just a matter of making fossil fuel users fully pay for the externalities they impose on others.
Meanwhile in the UK, coal consumption has gone down 96.5% per capita since 1965 despite an increasing population (95.7% in absolute terms). Germany and the USA have also had (smaller) reductions per capita, though the world average is up about 16%: https://ourworldindata.org/energy#explore-data-on-energy
Also relevant: we will continue to burn fuels until the storage/long distance grids catch up with the generation.
Storage is a completely separate axis to generation, which the UK also found out during the coal miner's strikes in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s; as the storage needed for road vehicles is more than sufficient for a national electricity grid, your expectation should be "around the time cars have renewable fuels, be that battery or hydrogen, not significantly sooner or later".
Grids are my personal preference (a global 1Ω aluminium grid would cost only about $265 billion in metal, using 1.7 years of current global aluminium production for something that will probably last about a century), but clearly require more international cooperation than the world wishes to engage with at present. As batteries (/hydrogen) are needed anyway for the cars, we're going to get batteries (/hydrogen).