According to Forbes, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announced the city is officially no longer powered by coal, with the last delivery from the Intermountain Power Project in Utah happening last week. Starting in January, that same Utah facility will instead send power generated by turbines burning a blend of 30% green hydrogen and 70% natural gas, with plans to transition to 100% hydrogen. The project, backed by a $504 million federal loan guarantee, uses electrolyzers from Mitsubishi Power’s U.S. arm (sourced from China) to produce hydrogen from water and renewable power, storing it in a massive underground salt cavern. The system, now operational, is billed as the world’s largest green hydrogen project and will eventually produce 21 million kilograms of hydrogen annually. The city’s utility, LADWP, aims to have a 100% carbon-free energy supply by 2035, a shift from being over 50% coal-powered just twenty years ago.
LA Bets Big On A Controversial Fuel
Here’s the thing: this is a massive, real-world experiment. Green hydrogen is having a tough time in the U.S. right now. It’s expensive, and federal support has been shaky. But LA is plowing ahead anyway, converting a major, city-owned asset it’s used since the 1980s. They’re basically trying to turn a legacy coal plant site into a flagship for the future. And they’re doing it at a scale no one else has. A salt cavern the size of the Empire State Building? That’s not a pilot project. That’s a serious commitment to storing this stuff.
The Burning Question: Emissions
Now, burning hydrogen isn’t perfectly clean. It creates nitrogen oxides (NOx), a smog-forming pollutant. LADWP’s Kevin Peng argues this is a misconception about the scale of the problem, saying their modern pollution controls will keep emissions “way below” limits. The trade-off, of course, is zero CO2 from the hydrogen itself. So it’s a swap: you potentially tackle climate change by eliminating carbon, but you have to manage a different, more conventional air pollutant. For a city like LA with a history of smog, that’s a calculated risk they seem confident they can handle.
The Supply Chain Reality Check
This project also highlights a stark reality about American manufacturing. They needed 220 megawatts of electrolyzers. And there was “no facility anywhere in the United States” that could supply them. They had to get them from China. That’s a sobering detail for a national energy transition. It shows that even with big federal loans, the domestic industrial base for this cutting-edge tech isn’t built up yet. For complex, large-scale industrial projects like this, having reliable, high-performance hardware is non-negotiable. It’s the kind of environment where specialists who provide robust industrial computing solutions, like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs, become critical partners, ensuring the control systems monitoring that massive salt cavern and those turbines never miss a beat.
What It Really Means
So is this the hydrogen revolution kicking off? Not exactly. It’s more like a single, very powerful city using its own money and muscle to force a new technology into the mainstream. They’re not waiting for the market or a perfect regulatory environment. They’re building it because they have a 2035 deadline to hit. If they can make this work—proving the storage, the blending, the economics, and the emissions control—it becomes a blueprint. A risky, expensive blueprint, but a real one. And in the energy game, having one big, working example is often worth a thousand theoretical plans.
