"Concrete plan" means a technology which satisfies all of these requirements:
1) demonstrated ability in a utility-scale plant
2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size
Yes, that's hard to meet. But the thing is, we've seemingly heard of hundreds of revolutionary storage methods over the last decade, and so far nothing has come to fruition. That's because they were promised by researchers making breakthroughs in the lab, and forecasting orders of magnitude of cost reductions. They're doing great experimental work, but they lack the knowledge and experience to judge what it takes to go from lab result to utility-scale application.
> 2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size
Why 2 years?
Even though I'm expecting the current approximately-exponential growths of both PV and wind to continue until they supply at least 50% of global electrical demand between them, I expect that to happen in the early 2030s, not by the end of 2027.
(I expect global battery capacity to be between a day and a week at that point, still not "seasonal" for sure).
Electrolysis hydrogen is only a little bit more expensive than hydrogen derived from methane and electrolyzers with dozens of megawatt are available. That seems pretty solid to me at this point in the energy transition.
Hydrogen generation isn't the problem, storing it over several months is. Economical, safe, and reliable storage of hydrogen is very much an unsolved engineering challenge. If it weren't, hydrogen storage plants would shoot out of the ground left and right: Even here in Germany, we have such an abundance of solar electricity during the summer months that wind generators have to be turned off and the spot price of electricity still falls to negative values(!) over noon, almost every day.
Yes, those are easier to store, but more expensive and less efficient to generate.
The question is the same as for hydrogen: If it's easy, cheap, and safe to generate, store, and convert back into electricity, why isn't it already being done on a large, commercial scale? The answer is invariably that it's either not easy to scale, too expensive (in terms of upfront costs, maintainance costs, or inefficiencies), or too unsafe, at least today.
With rapidly dropping PV prices it just gets cheaper - this is only a relatively recent thing; the projects that exist to exand production are barely complete yet .. capital plant takes time to build.
Fortescue only piloted athe the world's first ammonia dual-fuel vessel late last year, give them time to bed that in and advance.
If that's so easy, cheap, and safe, why aren't there companies doing it on a large scale already? We're talking about billions of Euros of market volume.
Right now it’s cheaper to make hydrogen from methane and methane is easier to store and process so no large scale storage of hydrogen is in demand. Nevertheless storage in salt caverns is a proven process that is in use right now eg. Linde does it.
1) demonstrated ability in a utility-scale plant
2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size
Yes, that's hard to meet. But the thing is, we've seemingly heard of hundreds of revolutionary storage methods over the last decade, and so far nothing has come to fruition. That's because they were promised by researchers making breakthroughs in the lab, and forecasting orders of magnitude of cost reductions. They're doing great experimental work, but they lack the knowledge and experience to judge what it takes to go from lab result to utility-scale application.