This is the May 19, 2022 issue of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter on weather updates in California and the American West. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox.
The Delta is paved with pumps and wind power.
Five days after our lively adventure in the West, photographer Rob Gauthier and I passed through Utah into the evening, following the setting sun as I bathed the red rock cliffs and snow-hungry Wasatch Mountains in a golden light. We cross the Strawberry River, a brilliant tributary of the Colorado River, before crossing Indian Canyon Highway 191, a scenic road covered in oil wells.
As the sunset turned to dusk, we enjoyed amazing perspectives of the Ashley National Forest from Indian Creek Pass, at an elevation of 9,114 feet. An hour later, we passed Beehive State’s first giant wind farm, near the end of the expansion that ends south of Salt Lake City.
When we arrived in Delta, which has a population of 3,600, it was already dark and I couldn’t see the huge chimney north of the city. It is located 710 feet from the Intermountain Power Plant, a coal-fired power plant that for decades has been Los Angeles’ largest source of electricity.
That’s right, if he hadn’t won the memo: About one-sixth of Los Angeles’ electricity comes from coal, the most polluting fossil fuel.
Rob and I were following the planned direction of a 732-mile line of force designed to bring wind force from Wyoming to California, and we stopped at Delta primarily because the line will run through the city. power plant
The last time I visited Intermountain, in 2019, Los Angeles officials defined their plan to turn the plant into herbal fuel, a fossil fuel that is less polluting than coal but remains the main cause of the climate crisis. However, by the end of the year, they had replaced the course, promising that the rebuilt facility would run on 70% fuel and 30% green hydrogen, and finally 100% green hydrogen.
Nothing like this had ever been tried before, and the power analysts I spoke to at the time were skeptical.
But much has since replaced, and I can see it from the roof of the power plant, the chimney that rose above.
John Ward, a spokesman for the Intermountain Energy Agency, pointed to several parcels of land that will be full of activity when main structure activities begin later this year. He told me the assignment would bring about 1,000 employees to the site. Already, the groups have moved dirt to prepare for the installation of new turbines that can burn a mixture of fuel and hydrogen.
A few days after our visit, Ward’s firm sold approximately $800 million in municipal bonds to fund the $1. 9 billion project.
“It’s on the global map,” Ward told me. Everyone is paying attention. “
He does not exaggerate. If all goes according to plan, Delta will house the world’s largest hydrogen force plant. Hydrogen will be produced by electrolysis, a non-polluting procedure that uses renewable force to separate water molecules.
Another key detail is the convenient presence of underground salt domes in front of the plant, which can be used to buy fuel for months. That means L. A. can produce green hydrogen on mild spring afternoons, when California has more solar power than it can use and burn the fuel on hot summer nights, when it’s getting harder and harder to keep the lamps on.
Back home, I spoke with Rob Webster, co-founder of Magnum Development, the company that owns the salt domes and develops hydrogen garages with Mitsubishi Power in a joint venture called ACES Delta. He told me that the assignment provides several benefits that can. . . It will not be provided through lithium-ion batteries, a vital tool that can buy blank electrical power after dark.
“A battery will discharge over time. And giant batteries last 3 to 4 hours. We buy that [energy] from spring to summer,” Webster said. “
There wasn’t much to see in Magnum’s assets on a Saturday afternoon this month. When Ward led us through the door in front of the coal-fired power plant, two trailers were the only infrastructure in sight, component of a sprinkler operation to dust off.
But when Rob sent a drone, he saw two neon blue brine pools just east of the site, built by Magnum but no longer owned. Originally, the company used the water to dig five underground caverns, pumping it into the salt dome, lifting it, complete with dissolved salt, and storing it in the ponds. The caverns are now used through Sawtooth Caverns, LLC, to purchase liquids, adding butane and propane, in a proof of concept of what Magnum and Mitsubishi intend to do next. with hydrogen.
The companies plan to build two hydrogen caverns and two salt ponds, at least initially. That will be enough to help Los Angeles meet its goal of a 70 percent fuel and 30 percent hydrogen blend when the new power plant opens in 2025, Webster told me. .
Each cave will be approximately the length of the Empire State Building, underground and complete with the lightest detail on Earth.
“Storage provides great flexibility,” Webster said. It’s none other than the inventory of coal they have in the back. “
To be clear, the task still faces uncertainties. Turbines capable of burning 100% hydrogen, for example, do not yet exist.
The fossil fuel giant said last year it would invest in the Magnum-Mitsubishi joint venture, and a Chevron spokesman told me the task “will be critical to delivering green hydrogen as a transportation fuel to California and other markets in the western United States. “But when I was contacted with Chevron this week, another spokesperson told me that the company had never made the investment, saying that the hydrogen allocation “no longer met our requirements. “
The federal government, on the other hand, seems to think it’s worth spending a lot of money on the allocation. Last month, ACES Delta obtained a $504 million conditional loan guarantee, which was recently finalized, from the U. S. Department of Energy. USA Personal equity fund Haddington Ventures, which backs Magnum, is running to secure another $650 million.
According to my calculations, it is around $3 billion that the parties expect to spend to build the new plant, the related electrical infrastructure, and the hydrogen production and garage facilities. And it’s all about L. A. 2035’s commitment.
At the same time, what happens outside delta is far more important than Los Angeles.
Although the L. A. Department of Water and ElectricityOperating the coal-fired power plant, and the 488-mile transmission line that carries its electric power to Southern California, the infrastructure is owned by Intermountain Power Agency, a consortium of Utah municipalities. Several other California cities are also involved, namely Anaheim, Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, and Riverside.
Ward had a prominent view of the political conflicts that followed, while Los Angeles made plans to avoid burning coal and then that fossil fuels were also not a sustainable solution. Intermountain Power Agency by depriving her of various privileges she had long enjoyed under state law.
But despite their political differences, Blue State and Red State partners in Intermountain have so far controlled to continue operating together. California cities need blank energy, and their counterparts in Utah need jobs and tax revenue.
“This has been a remarkable assignment. You have more than 30 partners from both ends of the political spectrum. And the way the allocation governance is set, nothing happens unless both ends of the line of force agree,” Ward told me. “Californians can’t do things unilaterally, Utahns can’t do things unilaterally. . . He is an emblematic figure of interregional cooperation. “
This kind of cooperation will be almost mandatory for California and other western states to phase out fossil fuels. The Delta salt dome can potentially be a large component, storing hydrogen for use through trucks and the region’s heavy industry.
Intermountain is a hydrogen renaissance driven by climate ambitions. The companies have filed or announced billions of dollars in investments in recent years, adding a pipeline allocation submitted through Southern California Gas.
“Once we’re going to scale, we’ll find that the burden of generating hydrogen becomes less and less expensive,” said Bryan Fisher, executive leader of the RMI think tank, which studies and advocates for climate-friendly energy.
Despite all the enthusiasm for hydrogen, there are still serious environmental concerns, adding the possibility of a combustion of unsightly emissions that form smog, and the fact that most of the hydrogen used today is not green, but is made from fossil fuels.
So it’s not surprising that when the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously this week to request an $8 billion percentage of the federal budget for hydrogen, some environmentalists added to the advocacy organization Food.
“LA doesn’t want a hydrogen hub to advance our blank energy goals,” said Jasmin Vargas, lead organizer for the group in Los Angeles, in a written statement. “Lately there are cheaper, safer and less water consuming features and we turn to these. “
Other climate advocates are cautiously optimistic. And it’s not just Los Angeles that’s interested in the federal budget for hydrogen, which was included in the infrastructure bill signed through President Biden last year. Gavin Newsom’s management said Wednesday it would work with “public and private stakeholders,” adding that LA, to submit an individual investment application for Golden State.
Federal money could also help fund more hydrogen garages outside Delta, with more caverns dug into the salt dome.
One last wild card at Intermountain: this 732-mile line of power, the direction of which Rob and I were following when we stopped at the coal-fired power plant. South Wyoming that will send renewable power to Los Angeles. Electrical wires would pass through the Intermountain site.
The Anschutz power line and wind farm, assuming they are built, may end up having nothing to do with Intermountain, besides sharing the airspace. Or they can provide some of the blank force needed to convert water molecules into hydrogen.
But it’s a tale for the day.
In the meantime, here’s what’s in the West:
The number of California homes facing a serious smokestack threat will increase from 100,000 to about 600,000 by 2050 as the Earth warms. It’s a one-of-a-kind model, my colleague Alex Wigglesworth writes. The offer is not a picnic either. A smokestack destroyed 20 homes along the Orange County shoreline last week on a rainy, windless day in Santa Ana; It possibly would have been triggered through Southern California’s Edison infrastructure, and the plants were so dry after years of drought that the mild weather didn’t matter, according to The Times’ comprehensive coverage. Laguna Niguel residents who lost their homes were devastated, reports Hannah Fry. And it’s not just wealthy coastal homeowners who are in danger: Bloomberg’s Todd Woody reports that in the past two years, 73 summer camps in the West have broken up or had to be evacuated because of the smokestack. You also deserve to be careful when booking an Airbnb; my colleagues Ben Poston and Alex Wigglesworth investigated and found that the company did not require hosts to notify visitors when they booked into a higher stack risk domain or how to evacuate. Here’s how to stay when booking an Airbnb, via Karen Garcia of The Times.
The California Coastal Commission has unanimously rejected a plan for a seawater desalination plant in Huntington Beach, despite objections from Gov. Gavin Newsom and other supporters who said it would provide safe drinking water as the region dries up. Several commissioners said they saw a role for desalination but were convinced the task would be too costly and vulnerable to sea level rise, writes my colleague Ian James. With or without desalination, responses to drought are badly needed; just ask the wealthy in Calabasas, who are concerned about new water restrictions for their koi ponds and fancy cars, reports Brittny Mejia of the Times. (Okay, on second thought, maybe ask someone else. ) On the Colorado River, Time Scientists and Crowd Historians Record an Occasional Moment of Combined Fascination and Horror as the Water Level Sinks in Lake Mead, Bringing Corpses to the Surface, Nathan Solis. writes Another kind of revelation takes place upstream from Lake Powell, where Zak Podmore of the Salt Lake Tribune writes that the conservationists campaigning to empty the giant reservoir no longer seem so “crazy. “
Half a century after DDT was banned, it’s still accumulating in North America’s largest land bird, the majestic California condor, and it’s a sign that humans are also at risk. This is what my colleague Rosanna Xia writes in an article about new studies identifying more than 40 DDT-related compounds circulating in marine ecosystems and accumulating in condors at the most sensitive point in the food chain. Not great! In other coastal pollutant news, The Associated Press reports plains All American Pipeline has agreed to pay $230 million to coastal fishermen and landowners as part of a settlement related to the Refugio oil spill in Santa Barbara County in 2015. Further inland, volunteer divers disposed of 25,000 pounds of trash from Lake Tahoe, The Times’ Parth M. N. commerce.
Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and West Virginia are suing to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from allowing California to fix its own vehicle. pollutant rules. Details here from my colleague Nathan Solis. Elsewhere in Washington, D. C. , House Democrats allege that Trump-era Interior Secretary David Bernhardt orchestrated a bribery scheme involving a development in Arizona, which Bernhardt denies. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote about the allegations and added a link to Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno. Speaking of Bernhardt, in the past he was a lobbyist for Rosemont Copper, which just had a federal court blocking its open-pit mine assignment near Tucson, according to Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services.
Three years ago, the National Park Service estimated its maintenance delay at $13 bills, and Congress approved a bill to pay a portion. Writes Kurt Repanshek for National Parks Traveler. What is happening is not very clear, that protecting valuable land and facilitating public access is not cheap. land and water until 2030: There is a developing debate about the role of personal land, especially farms and ranches. This story by Stateline’s Alex Brown does a wonderful job in exploring the debate. California, meanwhile, is securing 2,100 acres near the confluence of the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers to create the first new state park in thirteen years, Paul Rogers reports for Mercury News.
With the recovery of the peninsula’s bighorn sheep populations, adding the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains in Southern California, state officials may downgrade the species from “endangered” to “threatened. “This is the story of Erin Rode of the Desert Sun, who points out that majestic beasts were first under California’s Endangered Species Act in 1971. Elsewhere in the desert, a lawsuit said the federal government had wrongly denied the Endangered Species Act’s protections to any of the states. Sage-Grouse, a distinct population from Sage-Grouse along the California-Nevada border, as reported through Scott Streater for E
In a smart year, California farmers can plant 500,000 acres of rice; however, this year there will be fewer than 250,000, hitting the Sacramento Valley’s economy. Sacramento Bee’s Dale Kasler explores why the scenario is so bad and how shortages of rice flooded rice fields can harm migratory birds. In Southern California, the Imperial Irrigation District is rushing to rein in farmers who are expected to use 92,000 more acre-feet of water from the Colorado River than they are allotted, writes Antoine Abou-Diwan of the Calexico Chronicle. I’m not sure, but my colleague Gustavo Arellano reached out to the oldest palm tree in Los Angeles to find out. He also featured a drought-focused episode of our podcast, The Times.
After a series of plane crashes, and concerns about lead contaminants, neighbors in Los Angeles’ Pacoima neighborhood are pushing to close an airport in front of their home. I had no idea that many small personal jets still use leaded fuel; this is one of the many unexpected main points of this story through the Times’ Rachael Uranga. Meanwhile, communities on the other side of the San Fernando Valley are worried about other types of pollutants. It’s been 15 years since Boeing agreed to strict cleanup criteria for the Santa Susana field lab at Simi Hills, the site of a partial nuclear meltdown in 1959. But that cleanup never happened, and critics say California is largely allowing Boeing to get away with a new deal, Olga Grigoryants reports for the Los Angeles Daily News. See also my past Santa Susana policy and the gas-fired power plant that also pollutes the air in Pacoima.
The largest wildfire ever recorded in New Mexico has been burning for a month and rural citizens are frustrated with the government’s response. They’re not satisfied with the “back burns” used to fight the fire along their asset lines, or the option that a prescribed burn is causing much of the chimney’s spread, reports Karin Bruillard of the Washington Post. Meanwhile, at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, researchers are reading how to combat climate-fed megafireplaces as they prepare for the option of an evacuation. Morgan Lee writes for The Associated Press.
Gov. Gavin Newsom needs lawmakers to pass a $5200 million “Strategic Energy Reliability Reserve” to keep lighting fixtures on for years to come, as heat waves worsen and California continues to phase out fossil fuels. Details here from Dale Kasler of the Sacramento Bee, who notes that Newsom is also asking for $1. 2 billion for other people to pay their electric bills. That’s especially important given that 3. 6 million homes are in default after missing payment deadlines, as electric power rates are rising faster than expected, according to Rob Nikolewski of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Newsom’s revised budget proposal also includes increased investment for the progression of geothermal energy and lithium in the Imperial Valley, reports Janet Wilson of the Desert Sun.
Sempra Energy has a new European visitor for liquefied herbal gas, as Europe tries to rely on Russian supplies. The San Diego Company, owner of Southern California Gas and San Diego Gas
Flagstaff, Arizona, and Boulder County, Colorado, are beginning to invest in carbon sequestration to help meet ambitious climate goals. Details here from Emily Pontecorvo de Grist, who writes that those local governments are among the first to seriously explore the carbon of the environment (while acting aggressively to reduce emissions). In the same vein, watch this disturbing but beautiful short documentary, published by L. A. Times, about environmentalists who settle in the trees of Northern California to try to block logging. Large trees buy gigantic amounts of carbon, keeping it out of the environment.
“Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver didn’t hesitate to address the confusing energy issues on his HBO comedy show. This week was no exception, with a comic book ridiculing Pacific Gas
If Oliver doesn’t fill his weekly quota of app reviews, check out this article from the Los Angeles columnist. Times Carolina A. Miranda calls the Los Angeles Department of Water and Electricity and other water agencies for their mediocre graphic design that encourages Southern Californians to save water. . DWP’s homepage, for example, “appears to have been optimized for Netscape last time,” Carolina writes.
Personally, I am a fan of the Imperial Irrigation District’s water and energy protection mascot, Dippy Duck.
We’ll be back to your inbox next week. If you liked this newsletter, share it with your friends and colleagues.
For the record: the week’s edition erroneously stated where the Green and Colorado Rivers are located. Its confluence is in the Canyonlands National Parks.
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Sammy Roth covers power for the Los Angeles Times and writes the weekly boiling point newsletter. In the past, he reported for the Desert Sun in Palm Springs. He grew up in Westwood and would love to see the Dodgers win the World Series again.
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