this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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Adding to the other answer, for longer lulls in energy generation, the power can be used to create hydrogen gas that can be burnt in gas plants.
So, why isn't everybody building hydrogen burning generators?
Right, because hydrogen is not working. It's expensive to produce but most importantly incredibly hard to store and very dangerous if it catches fire.
I propose we use antimatter energy storage instead. No risk of it catching fire if you use anti-hydrogen!
Anti-hidrogen can still burn in the presence of anti-oxygen, but that's way safer than being in the presence of regular oxygen
Because hydrogen-ready power plants are not the same as natural gas power plants, as hydrogen gas is not a drop-in replacement for natural gas. And right now, when natural gas is still relatively cheap and renewable energy is not yet absolutely dominating the energy mix, politicians are fearing the cost of building the infrastructure for generating, transporting, storing and burning hydrogen gas.
In the future, hydrogen gas plants promise to be the best fit to pair renewable energy with, but right now the cost of it and the availability of fossil fuels do not force the hand of the people responsible for planning the future of the energy grid.
In the distant future, I see purely renewables backed by hydrogen, and nothing else. But not in our lifetime. Over produce with renewables everywhere, and store the excess by using it to produce hydrogen, then store the hydrogen to power anything when renewables isn't viable. The development and build out of renewables has started, but it'll be a long time time will over produce, and the build out and development of hydrogen hasn't really started yet.
Of cause it has started. Germany has plans of what is to be its hydrogen backbone. Electricity is set to be about 80 % renewables in 2030. So slowly starting to build up the hydrogen infrastructure starts now.