GHC Response to LA Times | Two Perspectives on Hydrogen’s Future in California
GHC Response to LA Times
Two Perspectives on Hydrogen’s Future in California
Last month, the Los Angeles Times recently asked whether California’s bet on green hydrogen is fading in their August 17 article “Hydrogen failed as a car fuel. Now California’s big dollar bet on it for green energy is fading, too.” In response, Janice drafted the following op-ed, in close coordination with another op-ed from Matt Dickinson, Sustainability Director of Fenix Marine Services, a large terminal operator at the Port of LA. While the LA Times unfortunately elected not to publish our op-eds, we wanted to share our perspectives with our GHC community, as there are important messages in both op-eds that may be helpful for your messaging and communications about the LA Times article, or the future of hydrogen generally. Given the upheaval in the Middle East, and the resulting fossil fuel price volatility and impacts on affordability, there has never been a more important and urgent time to focus on clean and renewable hydrogen development.
Hydrogen’s Future Isn’t Fading – Its Taking Shape in LA
By Janice Lin, Founder and President of the Green Hydrogen Coalition
The Los Angeles Times recently asked whether California’s bet on green hydrogen is fading. It is a fair question.
Hydrogen faces real national headwinds. Federal policy has shifted; projects have been delayed or canceled, and California’s hydrogen passenger-vehicle market has struggled even as battery electric vehicles have gained ground.
But that does not mean hydrogen has failed. It means we are getting clearer about where hydrogen is truly needed, and where it can deliver the greatest value.
California should electrify everything we reasonably can. We need vastly more renewable electricity, transmission, batteries, and electric vehicles. Direct electrification will be the most efficient solution for much of our economy. This has never been an either/or choice between electrification and renewable hydrogen. We need clean electrons and clean molecules.
Renewable hydrogen is also essential for producing fuels that batteries cannot replace. Ships need energy-dense fuels for long voyages. Aviation will require enormous quantities of sustainable fuel. Fertilizer production already relies on hydrogen. Some heavy-duty transportation and cargo-handling operations require long operating hours, high power, and rapid refueling. Hydrogen is also the fundamental building block for renewable ammonia, methanol, and synthetic aviation fuels. Production of these liquid renewable fuels requires renewable hydrogen.
And then there is the electricity system itself. As California electrifies transportation, buildings, ports and industry, grid reliability becomes more important, not less. Solar, wind, and batteries can do most of the work. But we also need resources that can keep the lights on during prolonged periods of low renewable generation, depleted batteries, transmission constraints or extreme demand.
Los Angeles has understood this challenge for years. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP)’s groundbreaking LA100 study showed that the city can reach 100% renewable electricity while maintaining reliability, but it also identified an enduring need for firm, dispatchable capacity and examined renewable fuels, including hydrogen, for long-duration energy storage. Now Los Angeles has an opportunity to turn that vision into reality.
Just 90 miles from the Los Angeles Basin, Element Resources’ Lancaster Clean Energy Center (LCEC) is poised to become one of the nation’s largest renewable hydrogen facilities. Its first phase is designed to produce approximately 21,000 metric tons of renewable electrolytic hydrogen annually – roughly the energy equivalent of 18.5 million gallons of diesel fuel each year. LCEC is supported by hundreds of megawatts of dedicated solar generation and battery storage, is permitted, and shovel-ready.
Actions taken before recent federal policy changes also preserved LCEC’s eligibility for as much as $1.8 billion in federal clean-energy tax incentives over the project’s life. That’s an extraordinary asset for Southern California, and an opportunity we should not allow to slip away.
What is needed now is demand. That is why SB 1350 matters. Signed into law on June 29, after passing both houses of the Legislature unanimously, the law recognizes electricity generated in turbines using qualifying renewable hydrogen within California’s Renewables Portfolio Standard. That unanimous bipartisan vote sent a powerful message: renewable hydrogen has a role in California’s clean-energy future.
One of its most important near-term roles can be providing firm, dispatchable power. LADWP’s modernization of Scattergood Generating Station and its broader transition of in-basin generation creates an opportunity to begin replacing fossil gas with renewable hydrogen while preserving the rapidly dispatchable capacity Los Angeles needs for electrification and reliability.
That can also solve a critical market problem. If the power sector becomes a dependable early customer, it can provide the anchor demand needed to finance projects like LCEC. That demand can then catalyze investment in storage, pipelines and delivery infrastructure – creating a platform that serves far more than the electricity sector.
The same infrastructure can help decarbonize ports, heavy-duty transportation and cargo-handling equipment; support the production of renewable marine fuels and sustainable aviation fuels; and connect California’s abundant renewable electricity with sectors that cannot simply plug into the grid.
Nowhere is that opportunity more visible than at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The ports are electrifying aggressively, as they should. But electrification also creates an enormous new requirement for reliable, resilient and zero-emission energy. Fenix Marine Services at the Port of Los Angeles has already helped demonstrate hydrogen fuel-cell cargo-handling equipment, including a commercial fuel-cell top handler. Hydrogen can also provide zero-emission onsite power and backup as terminals electrify more of their operations.
The principle should be simple: deploy batteries where batteries work best. Electrify equipment wherever direct electrification makes sense. Build far more renewable generation and transmission. But where an energy-dense fuel is still required, the alternative to renewable hydrogen is too often not a battery. It is a fossil fuel. Rejecting renewable hydrogen because it is not the solution for every application risks prolonging fossil-fuel dependence in precisely the sectors that are hardest to decarbonize.
Southern California has everything needed to do better: world-class renewable resources, engineering talent, skilled workers, ports, industrial demand, and one of the largest energy markets on Earth. The Antelope Valley and Mojave Desert alone contain extraordinary solar resources. We can use those assets to build a clean-molecules economy producing renewable hydrogen, ammonia, methanol and sustainable aviation fuels here in California.
Doing so would also strengthen energy resilience and economic security. Locally produced renewable fuels can reduce exposure to fossil-fuel price shocks and geopolitical disruptions while creating thousands of family-sustaining construction, manufacturing, and operating jobs. LCEC alone will create approximately 1,200 construction jobs.
We have spent years building the policy foundation. Now it is time to build the market and show the rest of the country how to do it. Los Angeles can lead again, using its purchasing power, its utility, its ports and its enormous energy demand to launch a Southern California clean-molecules economy.
The national hydrogen industry faces real headwinds, and federal policy has changed. California does not need Washington to define its clean-energy future. The Lancaster Clean Energy Center is permitted, shovel-ready and ready to move forward.
Southern California has the resources, the policy framework, and the project pipeline to build this market and lead the country.
A Clean Port Must Also Be a Resilient Port
By Matthew Dickinson, Sustainability Director at Fenix Marine Services, a marine container terminal at the Port of Los Angeles
At a marine container terminal, every new technology eventually has to answer the same question: Will it work when we need it to work? Not in a laboratory. Not in a presentation. On the terminal.
Ships arrive. Trucks queue. Refrigerated containers require continuous power. Cargo-handling equipment operates for long hours under demanding conditions. When an important system goes down, the consequences can extend well beyond the terminal gates. If the energy stops, eventually the cargo stops. That reality should inform the next phase of port decarbonization.
The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are undertaking one of the most ambitious transformations of transportation infrastructure in the country. Electrification will appropriately play a central role. Battery-electric cargo-handling equipment, charging infrastructure, and major utility investments are already changing how terminals operate. But electrification also changes the architecture of our energy system.
A diesel-powered machine carries much of its energy onboard. An electric machine depends on an interconnected system of utility power, substations, transformers, switchgear, chargers, controls and other infrastructure to keep operating. That is not an argument against electrification. It is an argument for designing electrification correctly.
I spent much of my career in the U.S. Navy, where resilience and redundancy were fundamental principles of critical systems. You did not design around the assumption that nothing would fail. You identified critical functions, considered credible failures and built systems capable of continuing the mission. Ports should approach the energy transition with the same discipline.
As we electrify equipment, we should be asking not only how much electricity we will need, but when we will need it, where it must be delivered, how quickly demand will grow, which loads are truly critical and what happens when part of the system becomes unavailable. Those are increasingly important questions.
Ports are not electrifying in isolation. Across the economy, transportation, buildings, manufacturing, data centers and other industries are adding substantial new electrical loads. At the same time, utilities must expand generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure to serve that growth. The Port of Los Angeles and LADWP are planning for this transition, and coordination between utilities, ports and terminal operators will be essential.
Terminal operators have another responsibility as well: resilience. Batteries can manage peak loads and provide immediate backup power. Onsite generation can reduce dependence on a single source of electricity. Microgrids can coordinate generation, storage and critical loads and potentially maintain essential operations during disruptions where technically and legally feasible.
Hydrogen may also have a role. At Fenix Marine Services, we have had the opportunity to successfully operate a hydrogen fuel-cell top handler in actual container-terminal service. That experience reinforced something that applies to every emerging technology: specifications tell only part of the story.
Once equipment enters live operations, different questions become important. Can it perform the required duty cycle? How reliably can it be fueled or charged? What infrastructure does it require? How will it be maintained? Is the energy supply dependable? Can operators use it safely? And ultimately, can the entire system deliver the performance and economics necessary for commercial deployment? Those questions should determine which technologies succeed.
For some applications, batteries may clearly provide the best solution. Other applications may eventually favor hydrogen or another low- or zero-carbon technology. Stationary generation and longer-duration storage may have different requirements altogether.
We should resist turning that into a contest between technologies. The objective is not to build the most electric port or the most hydrogen-powered port. The objective is to build the cleanest, safest, most reliable, and economically sustainable port energy system we can. That requires optionality.
Southern California must prepare for extreme heat, earthquakes, wildfires, equipment failures, cyber incidents and other disruptions that are difficult to predict. At the same time, the port complex must accommodate increasing electrical demand as cargo-handling equipment and supporting infrastructure transition toward zero emissions.
No single technology solves all of those challenges. A resilient port energy system will likely consist of layers: a strong utility grid, efficient electrical infrastructure, intelligent controls, energy storage, strategically deployed onsite generation and, where operationally and economically justified, alternative zero- and low-carbon energy sources.
The exact combination should be determined by engineering, economics, safety, emissions performance and operational experience—not by allegiance to a particular technology. That distinction matters.
Decarbonization and resilience are sometimes discussed as separate objectives. At a critical piece of national supply-chain infrastructure, they cannot be. The energy system we build to replace fossil fuels must ultimately be capable of supporting the operational reliability the supply chain requires.
The Port of Los Angeles has long served as a proving ground for cleaner transportation technologies. The next opportunity is larger: demonstrating how one of the world’s major port complexes can decarbonize without sacrificing the reliability that American commerce depends upon.
We should electrify aggressively. We should continue testing emerging technologies. We should invest in storage, distributed energy and grid infrastructure. And we should allow technologies—including hydrogen—to earn their place based on measurable performance.
The goal should not simply be to replace one energy source with another. It should be to build a better energy system. Because for a port responsible for keeping cargo moving, a clean port must also be a resilient port.
About Green Hydrogen Coalition
The Green Hydrogen Coalition (GHC) sponsored Senate Bill 1350, which brings legislative direction to California's Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) Guidebook. GHC describes SB 1350 as a no-cost policy option intended to spur development of green hydrogen, create and sustain union jobs, strengthen grid reliability, and give California more renewable energy and fuel options amid price shocks, supply disruptions, and global instability.
The GHC is an educational 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization focused on advancing clean and renewable hydrogen to accelerate multi-sector decarbonization and combat climate change. Its donors include foundations, end users, developers, utilities, and other supporters of a reliable, affordable, clean renewable hydrogen fuel economy.