Yes I’m aware of water storage, and even quite fond of it, but it’s very dependent on geography (as you need a very large body of water so you can’t really just use a water tower) and also incredibly expensive. There are generally more effective and profitable uses for land.

Meanwhile BESS is tiny, something like 30MW per acre.

Storing energy as hydrogen is a fool’s errand, in fact many of the new use cases for hydrogen are snake oil touted by people looking to sell more hydrogen. Even ignoring the fact that hydrogen leaks through and embrittles any container it’s stored in (or that it explodes violently), converting hydrogen to electricity only leaves you about 70% of the energy you put in.