There’s a growing consensus in the West that green hydrogen could play a key role in decarbonizing the region’s energy system, but questions still loom around exactly how the fuel will be applied in that effort.

“There still is a broad range of opinion about hydrogen’s role in the clean energy future, and I think as responsible regulators and a policy community, we’re trying to figure out what that looks like and how we guide the marketplace in the conversations in our respective jurisdictions,” California Energy Commissioner Andrew McAllister said Wednesday at the fall joint conference of the Committee on Regional Electric Power Cooperation and Western Interconnection Regional Advisory Body (CREPC-WIRAB).

Europe is further along in the “conversation” about hydrogen, McAllister said. “We can learn from that.”

McAllister has been expressing bullish sentiments over green hydrogen for at least a year. Speaking at the Green Hydrogen Coalition’s (GHC) first annual conference last November, he mused that “the planets are aligning” for the fuel source.

At the CREPC-WIRAB meeting last week, he said that observers from outside the industry are starting to pay attention, pointing to a recent article in The Economist that declared that green hydrogen’s “moment is here at last” while also “acknowledging it is going to take some big investments.”

“There are big bets being made, and I think there’s a lot of positive momentum,” he said.

McAllister thinks it will take a “generational” investment in infrastructure to elevate hydrogen’s position in decarbonization.

“And yet we don’t really have time to wait a generation to make it, so we have to sort of figure out what works and then scale that as quickly as possible,” he said.

Green Bloom in Utah Desert?

One of the country’s biggest green hydrogen investments will take shape at the Intermountain Power Plant (IPP) in Delta, Utah. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) next year kicks off an ambitious effort to convert the 1,800-MW coal-fired plant into a natural gas-fired generator designed to burn a fuel mix containing 30% green hydrogen that will be produced and stored on site.

The utility’s goal is to eventually burn 100% hydrogen after only “modest” modifications to the plant’s Mitsubishi turbines, said Greg Huynh, LADWP operating agent manager, during WECC’s annual meeting in September.

LADWP envisions IPP as a kind of large storage project, with wind and solar surpluses being used to electrolyze water into hydrogen, which will be stored in salt caverns near the plant and later used to fuel dispatchable firming energy when weather-dependent variable resources taper their output, especially for periods longer than those that can be served by most storage batteries.

“The idea of multiday and seasonal energy storage is going to become very important,” Huynh said. “What we’re looking at is the seasonal shifting of renewable energy; as energy is being curtailed in the shoulder months of the year, what we could do [is] take that energy and store it in large volumes and for a long time.”

With connections to Nevada via a 345-kV AC line and to Southern California through a 500-kV DC line, IPP’s location in the Western Interconnection positions it well to perform that reliability function, Huynh said.

At the CREPC-WIRAB meeting, GHC special adviser Laura Nelson lauded the IPP project and echoed the theme of green hydrogen playing a key role in contributing to grid reliability in the West. Nelson said GHC has been “engaging folks that are doing modeling on this front, like [WECC], the National Labs and other stakeholders, that are evaluating the role and potential for green hydrogen to serve as some of that dispatchable and long-duration energy storage.”

GHC last year launched the Western Green Hydrogen Initiative to explore the production and use of hydrogen to support policies to decarbonize the Western grid.

“It seems really in our interest to come together as states and as provinces to consider roadmaps or paths forward for developing resources that can address this issue, and green or clean hydrogen certainly shows up as one of those opportunities,” Nelson said. “And this isn’t going to be specific for any state or province. It really is going to be a significant regional lift in terms of identifying and realizing this opportunity.”

Grid Potential

For all his optimism regarding green hydrogen, McAllister last week seemed sanguine about the short-term prospects for applying the fuel to the electric grid.

With a target to decarbonize its grid by 2045, California’s modeling has shown that “the need for clean, firm power has really emerged as a gap” that green hydrogen could fill, McAllister acknowledged. But at this point it’s still too difficult to estimate the future cost-effectiveness of using hydrogen in the power system, he said. “If you’re going to do a production cost model, you need to know what the costs are and what that trajectory looks like.”

Instead, California is currently focusing most of its hydrogen efforts on other sectors of the economy.

“We know that transportation is going to be a big focus for hydrogen, and that’s where most of our policy and our investments have taken place thus far,” McAllister said. “And also in the industrial sector for high-heat applications and difficult-to-electrify sectors.”

David Bobzien, director of the Nevada governor’s Office of Energy, said his state is establishing a “beachhead” in the hydrogen economy with Air Liquide’s construction of a blue hydrogen plant in North Las Vegas that will produce enough fuel for about 40,000 vehicles, which will be shipped to California.

“But it stands to reason that you can see the next phase for that being fuel availability for transportation needs in our own state,” Bobzien said.

“I would maybe suggest focusing on transportation to start as sort of a bite-sized step,” McAllister advised, adding that California’s efforts have focused on funding programs to build hydrogen fueling infrastructure and help original equipment manufacturers get a foothold into the state to develop the market.

GHC’s Nelson also sees opportunity for green hydrogen in the transportation sector, including maritime and air transport, as well as in the natural gas sector. But her emphasis at the CREPC-WIRAB meeting was on the electric industry.

“As we look at these fossil fuel plants that are going to be decommissioned, what are we going to replace them with?” Nelson asked. She sees “significant” opportunities for green hydrogen in the power sector, including in fuel-blending, replacement of existing plants and microgrid applications.

“I think the modeling work that we’re going to pursue through the Western Green Hydrogen Initiative will definitely help to continue to inform what that opportunity looks like.”