Haha, yeah. We have to have hydrogen, and a lot of it. It's not an "if", it's a "there is no 0-carbon economy without a load of it". Even Spain, likely needs about 20GW, they'll end up with more of course.
Texas alone will see over $100 billion in the hydrogen ecosystem over the next 15 years, it'll come in torrents around 2027-2035. Globally, about $1 trillion.
That's why every major turbine manufacturer is working on turbines that can fire off a variety of mixes with hydrogen/natural gas, up to 100%. I'd bet $10,000 that by 2030, at least 10 turbines around the world are mixes with 5-6 more under construction or in process of refurbishing natural gas generators for it, 2035 we'll see about 10+ that transitioned to 100% hydrogen fired and 25+ mixed. It's going to turn into a flood.
The future of green hydrogen is dirt cheap, it'll be on price parity with natural gas pretty much everywhere in 20 years, and sooner in places that put in place the mechanisms to actually build renewable generation most efficiently. In 15 years in Texas, the oil & gas state, it'll reach price parity, might even be cheaper. We're headed to single digit $/MWh by 2030, green hydrogen producers will buy those off-take contracts. If at any point a breakthrough in catalyst engineering comes through, which it probably will because green hydrogen was always a novelty while competing against maybe the most powerful industry in the world, everyone will reach price parity sooner. Needless to say, good enough.
They're going to go up (or moreso refurbishing of existing natural gas generators) all over the world. Because it's a perfect scenario. Really, it's a gift. You couldn't ask for anything better for a roadmap. Green hydrogen, and its ecosystem, has to scale, there is no other option. To scale, you have to start at home. You have to actually produce and use it, weave its path into industry, like a, I don't know, "transition"
So you're hopefully integrating ever cheaper renewable generation, market adding ever cheaper batteries, flowing green hydrogen from ever cheaper electrolyzers into ever more transitioned industry, mixing it into natural gas networks up to a certain %, and it just so happens you can also scale up hydrogen production and lower emissions + balance grid as needed by firing it off in turbines that would be firing off 100% natural gas instead. Ah yeah, that's the stuff. Electrolyzers will also largely be allowed some flexibility, pulling moreso from grid if renewable generation is leading to really low wholesale, so it also provides an additional mechanism for electricity market price stability (along with batteries), which helps facilitate more renewable generation with better project economics. That could really encourage more entities to install when they might not have otherwise, with renewables getting ever cheaper and obviously electricity demand is going to increase substantially if we're doing our jobs, so then you also have ever cheaper batteries and electrolyzers which leads to better potential project economics for marginal renewable generation.
So, that's how it's going to work, or should work anyway. And no one is even looking at 2019-2020 random days trying to project out 15-20 years. A 0-carbon grid won't look anything like today, aside from the fact every major grid in Europe could easily have 250GWh+ battery grid capacity in 20 years, 40-50GW of electrolyzers, and a whole smorgasboard of hydrogen turbines firing varying mixes, if they actually update their onshore wind turbines in the 2030s they'll also have ~50% capacity factor wind, probably more in areas. No one has any idea what the hell this is going to look like with electricity demand also having to at least double or triple, the point is to build and integrate, as far as wind, you keep raising fleet capacity factors by actually using new industry best practices, every year, you transition and in doing your job you take chunks out of "no wind/low wind" times just by doing what you should do. The UKs average onshore wind capacity factor was 26% in 2019, with some of the most power dense winds in the world on average, and onshore wind is essentially banned entirely across the whole of England for years now (how FF + idiots always crater an industry, insane regulation and delays with 0 help. and not the Scots, although they finally figured out they have to actually implement industry best practices about 12 months ago), whereas new projects today would be about 40% capacity factors if built to spec, repowering too and could probably get even higher than that at those premium sites but no one can even go repower because they have ridiculous requirements with 3-5 year delays. and all the guys I know there when I did some work with BP London are saying their fellow Brits are a bunch of "daft posh prats". Not sure what that means, but yeah.