Cheap, sustainable hydrogen through solar power

Having seen too many such announcements about promising green technologies, I tend to ask a few questions when seeing something like this. One of them is what state a technology is in (early research, announcement, small prototype, industrial scale prototype).

It is not really clear from the article what the scale and state of this technology is, but at least from the pictures this looks like small and very early stages. It's of course a good thing to do early research, but already pitching that with claims about it being "cheap" sounds dishonest if you're far away from a working, industrial-scale prototype.

COVID saw some interesting procedral changes - massive industrial scale parallelism.

Multiple candidates were developed and trialled in parallel with ramping out mass production, storage and shipping.

Some of this was wasted effort, some of it was useful regardless of which candidates made the final vaccine cut.

The end result was dramatically compressed rollout times.

Right now the world has a billionare or two with negotiated contracts to deliver green (not blue) hydrogen (eg: to Germany) at a scale that significantly increases world hydrogen production within a 5-10 year time frame.

Already the industrial elements are being built for transport, end use, power collection sites, etc.

This activity makes the possibily of dropping in better methods of hydrogen spliting as they are developed feasible in a shorter time frame than otherwise thought possible.

You can add hydrogen to natural gas (using existing pipelines and storage), and so slowly replace that. No changes to existing infrastructure needed up to maybe 20% I think.

No, too many losses. Same problem with storage.

Use isn't that expensive, fuel cells do exist.

The problem with green hydrogen (made with electricity) is the inefficiency.

It's only good for storage when you have already filled every battery and pumped hydro storage you have and are still making an excess. Electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity conversion is so hilariously inefficient that even petrol engines can beat it.

"The catalyst is made of indium gallium nitride nanostructures, grown onto a silicon surface."

World gallium production is 400 tons a year. World indum production is 70 tons a year.

How did "cheap" get into this?