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Why would a retired physicist talk about chocolate factories, football penalties and kettles in the same breath as hydrogen? Because, as Averil explained to the Science & Technology Group, they’re all part of the same story: Britain’s electricity system is more fragile than most of us realise, and hydrogen may be one of the more promising ways to shore it up.

Start with a myth-buster: China isn’t the worst per-person carbon emitter — that’s the United States, at nearly three times the UK’s output. And the biggest electricity user per person worldwide isn’t China or Qatar but Iceland, thanks to the data centres keeping our photos and AI chatter flowing, with more now being built here too.

Britain’s grid, meanwhile, is far from bottomless. Even flat out, the UK can generate about 70 gigawatts — roughly one kilowatt per person, not enough for the whole country to boil a kettle at once. Demand spikes sharply too, famously at half-time in big football matches, and only gas can respond fast enough. Last summer, a chain of failures — a failed interconnector, weak gas and wind output, near-empty batteries — brought the country within a whisker of blackouts. And that was midsummer.

Wind and solar aren’t complete answers either. Britain doesn’t even own most of its own wind farms, and the cable infrastructure to bring their power inland is so poor that we pay farms roughly £200 million a year not to generate — rising to a forecast £2 billion by 2030. Switching every home to heat pumps would meanwhile cost thousands per house and take decades longer than we have.

This is where hydrogen comes in — not as a rival to wind, solar or heat pumps, but a useful extra tool. It can be made by running electricity through water, using surplus wind power that currently goes to waste instead of paying farms to switch off. Store that energy as hydrogen, and you’ve solved two problems at once.

Hydrogen already does more than most realise. British Gas quietly blends it into the ordinary gas supply, unnoticeable at the hob, and modern boilers are largely “hydrogen ready” already. Britain has done this switchover before: town gas, itself half hydrogen, gave way to natural gas town by town in the 1960s and 70s. JCB is fitting hydrogen engines into diggers, hydrogen buses run successfully abroad, and Birmingham researchers have found an algae that produces hydrogen when fed chocolate-factory waste.

Safety fears, Averil argued, are largely inherited from old school demonstrations — the famous “pop test” explosion. Safer storage methods using magnesium hydride powder mean tomorrow’s hydrogen tank needn’t be pressurised or super cooled and remain inert until heated in the engine.

None of this means hydrogen alone will save us, Averil stressed. Britain needs several solutions working together, not one silver bullet. But hydrogen’s quiet progress from crank idea to serious infrastructure deserves more attention than it gets.