[the8472]

The same could be said about electric cars which are powered to a large degree by electricity from fossil fuels.

The key aspect is that electricity decouples production from consumption.

The same can be done for hydrogen, i.e. one group of people can work on optimizing the hydrogen-electricity conversion while another group of people focuses on optimizing the renewable-hydrogen conversion.

[toomuchtodo]

Disagree. There's no point in wasting time refining the process of burning natural gas into the process of cracking it into hydrogen, when you can simply cut out natural gas entirely and use solar, wind, hydro, and utility scale battery storage.

Fuel cells are a dead end, except possibly in space travel.

[the8472]

Re-read my comment, I did not mention optimizing the process of cracking natural gas.

[toomuchtodo]

I did. You didn't mention a fuel source. There is no fuel source on Earth that can be converted to hydrogen other than natural gas (unless you're speaking of water, which is terribly less efficient than using a battery directly).

What fuel source are you suggesting for fuel cells?