Abu Dhabi already sells solar electricity for 1.35 cents/kWh. That price will drop by at 3-5x as solar reaches maturity. Natural gas plants sell power for ~6cents/kWh. Green hydrogen will have at least 5.5cents/kWh ($1.80/kg) of wiggle room to generate returns.
Many people consider batteries to be superior to hydrogen for all business cases. This isn't true for applications that need more than ~10 hours or so of capacity. Sub 10 hours is a huge market and encompasses almost all transportation, but there is a vast market for storage beyond 10 hours.
The Achilles heel of batteries is that the power of the battery and the energy stored by the battery are linked. An Li battery can easily discharge itself in one hour. If you want 10 hours of storage you need to buy a battery that could deliver 10x the power you're asking it to. This dramatically increases the cost and sheer tonnage of materials required to make the required system. Green hydrogen systems only require equipment that can deliver power at 1x the requirement with a storage tank that holds 10 hours of fuel. This means that there is always a crossover point where hydrogen becomes cheaper than batteries. My projection for the future is that this number will be around 10-20 hours.
This makes hydrogen the best choice for many applications and is the reason why lots of governments are into the idea. Transportation is only around ~20% of the energy we use, much of the rest might come from renewable hydrogen in the future.
