>>I'd say 15 years.
That's pretty much what I was thinking, but less analytically than you. I was just asking myself a simple question: "Try to remember back to 2011 and how it felt with respect to EVs. Are we there with hydrogen?"
When I bought a car in 2004, I remember thinking that it would be the last ICE car I would ever buy and the next car would be electric. If felt to me then that by 2014, most cars being sold would be electric. To get from there to widespread adoption of electric will have taken roughly 22 years from that point (just guessing that by 2026 electric will make up a large percentage of sales). It feels like that's where hydrogen is, but I would say there's a lot more will to get new tech on the road, so it should take less than 22 years, but 10 seems very optimistic.
>> massive truck stops
Even just high-speed stations. As I said in the other thread, a current supercharger station is a megawatt for two charging slots. If you want to have a 50-slot plaza, you're looking at 25 megawatts. Add in 10 stations for trucks at say double that and you're at 35 megawatts. The grid will need massive upgrades to have one of those every 50 miles.
Of course, the corner gas stations will mostly go away if they don't get hydrogen going, so they have a strong incentive to add it. The nearest town to us as 12,000 residents. A rough mental count says there are seven gas stations. The smaller town 10 miles down the road has another 4. If everyone had battery vehicles they charge at their homes and hotels, those stations disappear. So they need hydrogen cars.
The other strong incentive for hydrogen is when renewable energy capacity is very high, hydrogen offers a way to convert that excess capacity and store it. Charging EVs at night is a... nightmare for a grid powered by solar. You need a nuclear base or some really good storage method. You're always taking about the energy cost of compressing hydrogen, but there's going to be a huge energy cost to putting all that solar electric in storage, whether it's a lithium battery bank or a molten slurry, and then pulling it out at night to recharge vehicles. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe most charging will happen during the deay at work and shopping centers, but I don't see that kind of capacity being built out. The EV owners I know mostly charge at night when they get home.
Not only does that make it very difficult to operate an all-renewable grid, it also means that right now they are using the dirtiest power of the day. From 4pm to 9pm in the summer, California often has its natural gas plants operating full-out. At noon on a cool day with low A/C demand, the power might have a negative value and CA has to pay AZ to take it.
Hydrogen for vehicles gives you a way to build huge solar capacity and almost always be able to use that capacity in full. As a hydrogen supplier (say Exxon), I just build my "refinery" right next to the solar farm where line loss is almost zero and I just tell them, "Whenever your sell price drops to X, I'll take all you can sell."
So I see a lot of incentives to get hydrogen up and running sooner from an infrastructure point of view completely aside from the range and charge time, i.e. end-consumer considerations
