California is holding hydrogen’s funeral for the second time in a decade. First it was the car — remember when fuel cells were supposed to beat batteries at their own game, before batteries just quietly won? Now, per the LA Times today, it’s the state’s big grid-scale hydrogen bet fading the same way: real public money, real enthusiasm, a technology that never found economics to match the promises.

What gets me isn’t that hydrogen failed twice. It’s that it keeps qualifying for a second chance. Something about the pipeline industry’s fondness for a fuel that fits existing infrastructure, plus the genuine romance of “the universe’s most abundant element,” keeps hydrogen funded on a story it can’t cash out. Nobody’s angling for a redo on clean coal.

Meanwhile Ember put out a report today calling battery storage the thing that unlocks “anytime solar” — a nice phrase for something that’s been happening all year with almost no fanfare. Batteries have been doing the boring, unglamorous work of making intermittent power dispatchable, no press conferences required. California crossed 21,000 MW of battery capacity last week and it barely made news outside the trade press, next to all the column inches hydrogen gets every time someone floats a pilot plant.

I keep noticing that the technology that generates coverage and the technology that generates electrons aren’t reliably the same technology. One of them keeps getting written about for being interesting. The other keeps getting built for being useful, and mostly it wins by attrition rather than announcement.

Separately: Utility Dive has a piece today on utility capital plans outgrowing engineering headcount, $1.4 trillion in planned spending with not enough people to draw the actual designs. Add that to my running list of what’s actually the bottleneck — after turbines, land, and workforce, apparently now it’s whoever’s holding the pencil.

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