I think you’re on the right track. But the issue is that today we don’t have even remotely enough renewable electricity (solar and wind) yet.
EVENTUALLY, in order to get enough GENERATION from solar and wind, we will need to build a large excess CAPACITY of solar and wind. As we all know, solar and wind generation is only a somewhat small fraction of their capacity, AND every once in a while they will have a large gap.
Nobody is even close to excess generation today. The best countries have maybe mid-double-digit renewable generation today, for small areas (Denmark, South Australia) and short spans of time, but none has significant excess capacity at sufficiently large scale.
There is also the issue that making hydrogen from natural gas is “much cheaper”.
We still need to get rid of the whole attitude where fossil fuel is “cheap”. Of course the earth holds enormous amounts of Gigawatt-hours of energy just sitting there in the ground just for the taking. So it is “understandable” that some people still believe fossil fuels are “cheap”. That must change. More than high carbon taxes, we must get to a point where fossil fuels are simply out of the equation.
I can find studies about the cost of making hydrogen from wind energy but they typically assume dedicating a wind park to a hydrogen making facility. Needless to say, nobody today will build a large wind farm and use it only for hydrogen. And the calculations still show that it’s not economic today (still more expensive than fossil).
The Wiki on Hydrogen production has somewhat detailed info and references, especially reading between the lines, you see that hydrogen production by electrolysis is still an experimental small scale affair whereas steam reforming is a mature, widespread and easy to procure tech. DOE and other research has been done for decades, here is one relatively recent roadmap: Hydrogen Production Tech Team Roadmap (PDF)
My own opinion:
Hydrogen is only one form of storing excess renewable energy. You can broaden the topic to other PTL (Power-to-Liquid) solutions, e.g. methanol or methane, or storage forms other than chemical, e.g. storing excess electricity as heat. Living in a cold climate, I used to worry about district heating for example. But once we get around to building that large excess of wind energy, then it will make eminent sense to store it (very inefficiently) as heat and run a small steam-turbine-cum-district-heating setup from it.
Again you can see we’re not remotely there yet. Before any of this is practical, we have to build a large excess capacity of solar panels and wind turbines.
Can’t happen quickly enough.
If that small country in the north of Europe could spend the same amount on wind as they spend on their new nuclear plants, they could get TWENTY TIMES more wind than they have now, and a capacity of twice the maximum demand. THEN we’d be talking.