Power2Gas has been a major topic. And the idea that this will become highly relevant in about a decade is behind the idea to allow Gas infrastructure investment as Green in Europe. This means Hydrogen but also synthetic natural gas.
They also cite something I haven't personally read, but which goes back all the way to 2009, again with hundreds of citations:
M. Sterner, Bioenergy and renewable power methane in integrated 100%
renewable energy systems, Ph.D. thesis, Kassel University (2009).
Of course as the roundtrip efficiency is better, its preferable to store Hydrogen directly if that is feasible (and this is why a pure electricity sector optimization model will never show methane).
But fundamentally the idea has been for a long time to run Gas power plants on carbon neural gases. This is an explicit point in the EU Taxonomy of labeling Gas investments as green. They can only do so if they retrofitted to running on carbon free gas from 2035 onwards. Siemens is selling their stuff as H2-ready for that exact reason [1].
Pumped hydro can not be meaningfully expanded, its only a small part of the overall solution.
I can see that there's a lot of momentum for that, indeed. But as you told me earlier, we moved from a system where engineers and planners offered options to choose from to a system that is driven by political will, and implementation concerns come down the line.
Both systems have their flaws: the first one is clearly detrimental to democratic oversight, and may sometimes cause authoritarian problems, where administrators don't see or overlook problems caused to individuals.
On the other hand, political-first systems tend to kill unviable or uncompetitive projects way too late, because implementer signal is attenuated.
A good example of this is the development of nuclear power in France and the UK in the 60's: both countries had a local reactor project which was politically favored. France, where engineers had a strong influence on politicians, killed it quickly and bought US licenses for its program. The UK on the other hand moved on with their local graphite-gas reactors, which proved much harder to implement, and hampered their program.
All of this to point out that power2gas is currently at a very early stage, and since this program is dominated by political will, it's extremely hard to know how well it will work, let alone have a good idea of the economic figures.
Maybe it will work. I hope so. But it's certainly not a done deal, and it's extremely unsettling to see our countries' energy safety be debated based on a few scientific papers or a planned demonstrator by people that won't have to actually implement it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas
Methanation and methane storage is at the same level as Hydorgen storage in optimal models. This here has 500 citations:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf
They also cite something I haven't personally read, but which goes back all the way to 2009, again with hundreds of citations:
M. Sterner, Bioenergy and renewable power methane in integrated 100% renewable energy systems, Ph.D. thesis, Kassel University (2009).
Of course as the roundtrip efficiency is better, its preferable to store Hydrogen directly if that is feasible (and this is why a pure electricity sector optimization model will never show methane).
But fundamentally the idea has been for a long time to run Gas power plants on carbon neural gases. This is an explicit point in the EU Taxonomy of labeling Gas investments as green. They can only do so if they retrofitted to running on carbon free gas from 2035 onwards. Siemens is selling their stuff as H2-ready for that exact reason [1].
Pumped hydro can not be meaningfully expanded, its only a small part of the overall solution.
[1] https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/news/magazine/2022/...