Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announces the end of the city’s electricity from coal.
Alan Ohnsman via Forbes
Los Angeles has officially stopped using coal-generated electricity and is set to fire up its first large-scale green hydrogen and natural gas power plant as the second-largest US city works to get all its energy from carbon-free sources by 2035.
“I can officially say that Los Angeles is no longer powered by coal-fired power,” Mayor Karen Bass said at a briefing Thursday, joined by the head of LADWP, the nation’s largest municipal utility, and other officials. “Last week, the Intermountain Power Project in Utah delivered the last coal-fired power to our city.”
Starting in January, the same facility in Utah’s Delta will instead send electricity to Los Angeles generated by turbines powered by burning a mixture of natural gas and hydrogen. Initially, the aim is to run a mixture of 70% gas and 30% hydrogen. But over time, the utility plans to switch to 100 percent hydrogen, made from water and renewable energy on-site and stored in a huge underground salt cavern next to the plant, said David Hanson, who manages energy projects for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
“We’ve been using the Intermountain Power Project since the 1980s. It’s built on top of a salt cave. They’ve known about it all along, but nobody really cared,” Hanson said. Forbes. The utility partners in the project are already making hydrogen and storing it in the cavern, which Hanson said is about the size of the Empire State Building. “It makes an excellent, leak-proof hydrogen storage facility.”
The Intermountain Power Project, which previously generated electricity for Los Angeles from coal, has been modified to run on hydrogen and natural gas.
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It’s the largest green hydrogen project “in the world, and it’s operational now,” he said.
LA’s power experiment comes at a time when prospects for carbon-free green hydrogen, at least in the US, have dimmed. It is more expensive to produce compared to producing industrial hydrogen by cracking natural gas, which is cheap but produces large amounts of carbon pollution byproducts. The Trump administration has also been unsupportive, canceling federal funding for so-called hydrogen hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest that were intended to improve large-scale clean hydrogen production and use.
However, the LA project has been in the works since 2022, when it won one $504 million loan guarantee by Biden’s Department of Energy for the Utah facility, with its equipment already installed and operating. Its electrolytes that split water, a process that releases only oxygen as a byproduct, were supplied by the U.S. arm of Mitsubishi Power and come from China, said Kevin Peng, LADWP project manager.
“At the scale we were building – 220 megawatts – there was no facility anywhere in the United States that could supply it,” he said. When the first phase is fully operational, the system will produce 21 million kilograms of hydrogen per year.
When hydrogen is used in a fuel cell to generate carbon-free electricity, such as in spacecraft or cars like Toyota’s Mirai sedan, water is the only byproduct. When burned, however, it produces water as well as nitrogen oxides (NOx), an air pollutant. But LADWP is confident that conventional pollution filtering systems already in use at gas-fired power plants can handle it.
“There is a misconception about how many emissions actually come from hydrogen,” Peng said. The Utah plant will use the latest selective catalytic reduction systems to keep NOx and all other emissions “well below the permissible limits. Plus we have the added benefit of zero CO2,” he said.
And that’s the city’s ultimate goal, Bass said. “In 2003, Los Angeles’ energy supply was 3 percent renewable and over 50 percent coal,” he said. “Today, just over 20 years later, our city is powered by 60% carbon-free energy and again, 0% carbon.”
