So, the energy is really solar & the hydrogen is simply a storage system (alternative to battery). Might be good if we can develop the infrastructure to handle & distribute hydrogen.
Yes, that’s basically what it is. A passive transfer of energy to free up hydrogen from water.
True that. There's also the possibility of storing hydrogen on site to re-use later, either as an alternative to natural gas or to fuel a fuel cell to make power.
I looked at the possibility of using hydrogen storage as a kind of long-term energy storage to go with my solar in case the Dims push us into a mark-of-the-beast type social credit score system to access energy. The idea would be to run an electrolyzer during the 8 warm months of the year that I pull almost nothing from the grid and have excess solar after charging my batteries to full to get through the night without the grid.
But it's horribly inefficient to generate hydrogen with an electrolyzer, compress it into tanks that I'd want to store in the ground for safety, then utilize that hydrogen gas to run fuel cells when my battery banks get low on charge. Running the fuel cell would probably at best give me only 20% or 30% of the power I spent creating the hydrogen and storing it.
I'd be better off spending that money increasing my battery bank size and solar array, and doing further energy improvements to the home (taking down the sheetrock in the walls to put in more insulation, replacing the old windows with triple paned windows). That would get me to 100% energy independence without curbing our lifestyles to ration our energy use. But for now it's not worth even that. I just keep it in the back of my head and do the math every now and then in case the Dims take their warmageddon cult energy policies to that kind of full control-freak level where I need to implement those changes.