Do you remember the Peak Oil craze? People underestimate the power of capitalism to solve problems (and create them - it's a perpetual cycle!).
I know grid scale vanadium batteries have been around for years in the research space, and that's almost plug and play compared to a move to hydrogen. Infrastructure is glacially slow. Any move to a new combustion fuel will move so slowly it's virtually standing still. After a possible hydrogen solution is found it'll take years to secure funding to get a trial plant off the ground. Why make the investment risk while gas is a known quantity and infrastructure already exists?
When someone like Twiggy decides to drop the billions on it then it'll get commissioned and built - more years. Then that plant will run for years as its efficiency is studied and problems pop up and are resolved.
Finally, we'll have the know-how to produce an economical plant for general use - maybe. Of course we'll need the engineers and technicians with industry knowledge to help build it, but many of them will be busy with the original plant, so we won't be able to just print out these facilities. And it'll still be new, so investment will be cautious. They'll let someone build the first one and they'll watch and see how it goes, then hire the same crew to build one for them.
Nobody will replace a currently functioning natural gas plant with hydrogen, it'll only be considered when building new or replacement - the cost is too great. I'd draw further comparisons with nuclear power. Scifi authors thought the entire world would be atom powered by now.
I think gas will be around for a while.
This is just my brainfart, I'm sure there are a bunch of holes in it.
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