Because it would involve pure hydrogen instead of some hydro-carbon stock, it would appear to be ideal fuel for a fuel cell. But fuel cells to this day remain notoriously expensive (and how trouble free will fuel cells be for, say, a 20 year plus operational life cycle – typical large scale power plants are in operation for decades without need for recapitalization of equipment cost along the way)?

Also, there will be the efficiency losses of this buffering cycle – efficiency loss when first using wind produced electricity to split water, loss involved in running compressors to compress hydrogen into storage tanks, loss involved when utilizing hydrogen to produce electricity again, loss involved in transforming that produced electricity into a high voltage, alternating current suitable for the utility grid. Accumulated loss for this buffering cycle might be 25 to 50 percent.

Of course the alternative is to not buffer at all and resort to idling wind turbines. There’s a major fiasco of that manner going on right now in Washington/Oregon. There’s been too much water run-off into the reservoirs and there’s going to be no choice but to send that water through the hydro turbines. The wind turbine farms are going to have to be shut down because the grid can’t absorb both outputs, and this will be a significant loss of revenue, impacting wind farm investors.

Being able to buffer wind turbine output is a huge problem that does need to be solved to truly make this a viable way to keep going.