While wind is more expensive than solar, and has issues highlighted in article, the higher capacity factors, and production outside of midday, means less battery capacity is needed to serve renewables, and batteries get charged more often.
A key to bringing down transmission costs for wind, especially offshore where transmission is the highest cost component, is hydrogen production. Picking up H2, or refueling, by trucks and ships can provide cheaper energy than transmission lines. Pipelines are even cheaper with enough volume, and double as storage.
The issue with hydrogen is that is diffuses and leaks straight trough metal pipes, and makes the metal brittle in the process. But… that property could also be used to create super dense storage, by intentionally diffusing it into something like aluminium
Plastic/FRC pipes solve the leakage problem. They are also salt water resistant. Soft steel NG distribution pipes have low leak rates as well. Converting hard steel NG transmission pipes is possible by lining them in plastic. In any near future, H2 only new pipes would be built. H2 is more valuable when it is pure because it has higher efficiency electric conversion than NG, as well as being an ingredient to several important chemicals.
That’s conveniently ignoring that the type of plastic or rfc you need are not quite cheap or quick to make
Spoolable FRP pipes up to 4" in diameter can fit on a truck. Rated for 200bar. Pre covid, this was quoted as $50k/km as full deployment cost with 10s of km per day buildout rate. Spoolable pipe that can fit on ships has no diameter limit.
I don’t know details of manufacturing process, but spools, plastic pipe extrusion, and fiber reinforcement should be highly automatable.
Not every random frp is suitable, hydrogen will fit trough most plastics and fibres. So… the cheapest crap won’t Just do the trick
PE pipes used for NG seem “good enough” https://www.pe100plus.com/PPCA/HYDROGEN-TRANSPORT-IN-POLYMER-PIPES-FOR-NATURAL-GAS-DISTRIBUTION-TEN-YEARS-OF-EXPERIENCE-p1737.html
PTFE is known to be better. Fiber reinforcement is mostly an outside layer to increase pressure resistance. Putting PE or PTFE inside existing steel pipes would also work.
– Polytetrafluoroethylene on Wikipedia