Just to be clear this can’t be solved with storage. Currently it can be but not permanently.
For ease of argument let’s say the grid runs 100% on solar with batteries that last a day. For 100% solar you need to build power for when demand is highest, winter, and supply is lowest also winter. Come summer demand is lowest and supply is highest. You can’t store all that energy in summer because you got fuck all to do with it.
It’s a really weird cost saving exercise but basically when supply is massively abundant it has to be wasted. No one is going to build that final battery that is only used for 1 day every 10 years.
Bringing it all together. In a 100% renewables grid with solar, wind, hydro and batteries a lot of electricity will be wasted and it will be the cheapest way to do it. Cheaper than now.
Quite a few people talk about this on youtube. Tony Seba and rethinkx is the best place to start in my opinion.
I’ll be interested to see what happens with this.
New forms of industry will work out if you got very low capital costs and high energy costs. The factory is going to be running, what? At most 25% of the year? Probably more like under 10 and unpredictable. That’s going to be so weird for profitability.
I feel like storing the hydrogen itself could be an issue. Storing methane seems way easier so I wonder if that happens instead. But is it cheap to make a device that can make huge amount of hydrogen or methane? I have no idea and no one seems to know what’s going to happen yet.
I just expect most of it to be dumped. Because it’s 1 less thing to buy.