Once per installation per x years. While battery and solar replacement seem like a long time, the massive scale needed for a global buildout will require a continuous stream of shipping. It’s not free and will never be locally produced everywhere. Obviously a couple orders of magnitude less shipping, but energy related shipping is not disappearing entirely.

Actually I’d like to see someone do that math, out of curiosity. In a world with all renewables, does energy related shipping drop from 40% to 1%? 0.1%?

Recycling systems will become absolutely necessary, preferably before the battery boom happens.

Which is still all due to investors not looking longer than 2 years since all of the crashing companies except Northvolt are startups. Lithium prices will always rise again at a much much higher rate than sodium.

Sodium was always better for grid storage due to temperature charging and discharging and still plenty cheaper than Lithium Iron Phosphate that it is a replacement for.

Lithium is also very abundant. OK, not as much as sodium, but still common.

CATL retooled to sodium and plans to produce both sodium/lithium hybrids and pure sodium packs.

“Traffic” definitely implies number of ships.

It can be useful for transport or in some industries like steel industry where the alternative is burning coal or LNG.

And not all the solar fields and power plants are in use during the day. Some power plants like nuclear fission reactors can't stop and relaunch that easily so they are used as the base, while renewables and gas are used according to demand because demand and power production have to be the same. So there are literally moments when solar and wind farms have to shut down during the day bc there is not enough demand for electricity. Using those timezones to produce hydrogen would be a good business

Hydrogen is terrible for energy storage, and even worse for energy transport. Especially if you're doing electrolysis to split water that you then re-generate with atmospheric oxygen in order to produce electricity. A battery, flywheel, or just pumping water upstream gets you far better efficiency, and shipping literally any product of a hydrogen reaction is likely to be more efficient than shipping a heavy H2 tank back and forth.

Solar power in the EU seem to be increasing by 20% year-over-year. It's hard to see a situation where shipping hydrogen to supply thermal energy to an existing factory would be cheaper than just building a local electrolysis plant and the necessary solar panels. (Unless, of course, you're already invested or employed in selling hydrogen as a direct fossil fuel replacement.)

https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-generated-more-power-than-fossil-fuels-in-the-eu-for-the-first-time-in-2025/