The largest municipal utility in the U.S. is betting big on generating electricity with green hydrogen out of sheer necessity, its top official said this week.

“We are on a crash course to recreate a new power system in Los Angeles, a new generating system to feed the electrical grid that we have, and we see green hydrogen as the solution to do that, and the only way that we know to accomplish the reliability that we need,” Martin Adams, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), said Monday.

Adams was speaking at the Building Hydrogen Corridors in the Pacific West for a Carbon Neutral Future conference, a two-day event hosted by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) of Japan and the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO).

The virtual conference convened panelists to discuss how governments, utilities, companies and other interested stakeholders could collaborate to accelerate adoption of green hydrogen as a fuel source throughout the western U.S. and Canada. It also provided a forum for Japan-based manufacturers to showcase their own efforts to bring green hydrogen into the mainstream for utility, industrial and transportation applications.

LADWP already has a major hydrogen project in the works with the conversion of the coal-fired Intermountain Power Plant (IPP) in Delta, Utah, into an 840-MW combined cycle natural gas-fired facility capable of burning a fuel mixture consisting of 30% hydrogen when it opens in 2025, transitioning to 100% by 2045. In partnership with Mitsubishi, which will provide the turbines for the new plant, the project will also include on-site production of green hydrogen, as well as storage of the fuel in massive salt caverns adjacent to the site. (See ‘Ecosystems’ Needed to Drive Green Hydrogen Growth.)

“In Delta, Utah, we have a very unique situation,” Adams said. “We have plenty of land for electrolysis; we have the setup for all the systems we need; we have plenty of water supply to convert the hydrogen. And we also have an underground salt dome rock formation, which allows us a really unique opportunity to store hydrogen.”

But a study published last March by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory showed that LADWP will require a large amount of dispatchable generation located much closer to home as it sets out to hit the city’s 100% renewable target — about 2,500 MW within the Los Angeles Basin.

The utility currently operates four gas-fired plants in the basin rated at a combined 3,400 MW of capacity. Three of the plants — Scattergood, Haynes and Harbor — sit on the coast and must be repowered or rebuilt to meet a California rule requiring power producers to phase-out plants that rely on ocean water for once-through cooling by 2029. Additionally, the Los Angeles City Council voted in September to require that 100% of the electricity used in the city be carbon-free by 2035, establishing a 2030 deadline for replacing the gas-fired plants.

That “confluence” of objectives dictates LADWP’s move away from natural gas to burning cleaner fuels, Adams said.

“And the only solution that we know and we see at this time is to burn hydrogen, and for us that means burning green hydrogen,” he said. The combined hydrogen power projects in the L.A. Basin would “dwarf” the IPP project in scope, he added.

“Those four power plants will have to have a number of power generating units that burn green hydrogen in the future in order to have a sustainable electrical grid and provide the kind of power supply that the city needs for the future and have a green supply,” Adams said.

While IPP, with its massive storage capability nearby, provides the “perfect setup” for a large-scale hydrogen project, Adams said those features can’t be transplanted into L.A.’s urban environment, raising questions about the kind of infrastructure needed to support hydrogen-fueled generation in the basin, and whether hydrogen must be shipped to the plants as a gas, liquid or ammonia.

“So we need to decide, what is the delivery pipeline going to look like? And where are we going to hold [the hydrogen]? … I’m going to generate power using hydrogen; I don’t want to be in the business of generating hydrogen. I like to deal with it and handle it as little as possible. Because right now, I bring in natural gas, and I just have a service connection. I handle as little as possible,” Adams said.

“I did not know that in the L.A. Basin, there’s 60 miles of hydrogen piping, running in the harbor area between certain vendors and oil refineries. How do we parlay into that? How do we get that hydrogen to become green hydrogen, instead of the gray hydrogen it is today? How do we get green hydrogen? And how do we build out that system? How do we take advantage of that infrastructure?”

Lower-cost Solution?

Sharing the panel with Adams was Peter Sawicki, regional director of sales and marketing at Mitsubishi Power Americas. Sawicki said Mitsubishi has performed its own study modeling the requirements of a net-zero grid by using the same energy market simulation software that utilities rely on to develop their integrated resource plans.

According to Sawicki, Mitsubishi “couldn’t get the [net-zero] model to converge without the use of hydrogen.” The alternative would require a “massive” amount of renewable generation subject to “massive” curtailment at times of oversupply.

The study concluded that a “pro-hydrogen” scenario results in a more efficient buildout of the grid, Sawicki said.

“We see what comes out to be a 20% lower system cost to reach net zero, which is kind of counterintuitive, when people think of hydrogen as being a very expensive infrastructure,” he said. “That is true, but if we think about the massive overbuild that would be needed to reach [zero carbon] without the use of hydrogen as a long-duration storage medium, that system cost winds up actually being more expensive.”

Adams thinks hydrogen’s day has arrived, but industry and the general public still need convincing.

“I get challenged all the time. People say, ‘Well, we’ve heard of hydrogen before; it’s come around in years past.’ I think we believe that we’re at the tipping point, that the momentum has changed, and this time it’s for real.”