The board of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on Tuesday approved a controversial plan to convert part of the city’s largest natural gas-fired power plant into one that also can burn hydrogen.
In a 3-0 vote, the DWP board signed off on the final environmental impact report for an $800-million modernization of Units 1 and 2 of the Scattergood Generating Station in Playa Del Rey.
The power plant dates to the late 1950s and both units are legally required to be shut down by the end of 2029. In their place, the DWP will install new combined-cycle turbines that are expected to operate on a mixture of natural gas and at least 30% hydrogen with the ultimate goal of running entirely on hydrogen as more supply becomes available.
The hydrogen burned at Scattergood is supposed to be green, meaning it is produced by splitting water molecules through a process called electrolysis. Hydrogen does not emit planet-warming carbon dioxide when it is burned, unlike natural gas.
The city-run utility says Scattergood’s conversion is integral to L.A.’s goal of reaching 100% renewable energy by 2035.
“This project is critical to LADWP’s clean energy transition as it helps us preserve a key power system asset, meet our clean energy goals, and ensures reliability for our customers,” Senior Assistant General Manager David Hanson said. “The Scattergood modernization project is the No. 1 priority on the power system’s ‘Top 10’ priority list. This project is essential.”
But the plan has many detractors, including a number of local environmental groups who say it will prolong the life of the city’s fossil fuel infrastructure at a moment when L.A. should be investing heavily in more proven clean technologies such as solar, wind and battery energy storage.
“I’m very skeptical that progress looks like maintaining reliance on gas plants,” said Julia Dowell, a senior campaign organizer with the Sierra Club. “When this project initially comes online, there likely won’t actually be any hydrogen in the mix, so we’ll still just be burning 100% methane for potentially an indeterminable amount of time.”
Nearly 50 people spoke up at Tuesday’s meeting, with detractors also expressing concerns about water use and pollution from burning the gas. While burning hydrogen does not produce CO2, the high-temperature combustion process can emit nitrogen oxides, or NOx, a key component of smog.
“For the communities living near these power plants, it’s really an environmental justice issue,” Dowell said.
Officials noted that the plan does not call for DWP to produce any of its own hydrogen, but rather to purchase green hydrogen from other suppliers. Upgrading the units now will mean DWP is “ready to go” if and when hydrogen becomes available, said Jason Rondou, DWP’s assistant general manager of power planning and operations.
“What we want to do is make sure that when hydrogen infrastructure is available, that we don’t have an obsolete unit — that we have a unit that is hydrogen-ready,” Rondou told The Times. He said the units wouldn’t be fired up often, but will ensure there’s enough local power during peak periods such as heat waves and wildfires.
However, the approved plan contains no specifics about where the hydrogen will come from or how it will get to the site. “The green hydrogen that would supply the proposed project has not yet been identified,” the environmental report says.
Industry experts and officials said the project will help drive the necessary hydrogen production.
“It gives developers, investors and communities confidence that Los Angeles is ready to lead on clean hydrogen at scale,” said Lorraine Paskett, chief operating officer of First Public Hydrogen Authority, a newly formed group of public agencies in California, including the cities of Lancaster, Industry, Montebello and Fresno, geared toward advancing sustainable hydrogen.
Paul Browning, a former executive in the gas turbine industry at companies such as Mitsubishi and GE Vernova, said wind, solar, hydropower and battery storage are all essential for moving away from natural gas, “but you can’t finish the job without green hydrogen or some other long-duration energy storage technology.”
“There’s some people who are a little bit worried that Scattergood and green hydrogen is a way to perpetuate the use of natural gas — I would just advise you it’s exactly the opposite,” Browning said. “This is the final nail in the coffin of natural gas power generation.”
L.A.’s ambitions also could be complicated by a shifting federal landscape. While President Trump initially seemed supportive of hydrogen as a source of American energy, his administration recently shortened deadlines for hydrogen tax credits and canceled billions in funding for hydrogen projects in the U.S. — including a $1.2-billion award for a major “hydrogen hub” in California known as the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems, or ARCHES.
The Scattergood conversion was set to receive about $100 million in ARCHES funding. DWP said it is pressing on despite the cut, and that the project is fully budgeted through the utility’s power fund.
But Theo Caretta, an attorney with the nonprofit Communities for a Better Environment, said the $800-million price tag is several years outdated and likely an underestimation of what the project will cost ratepayers. The price of turbines alone has increased under Trump’s tariffs on imported goods, steel and aluminum.
He and other opponents said they would prefer to see DWP invest in renewable technologies that are already on the grid, such as solar and battery storage, demand response and distributed energy resources.
“One main environmental concern is that this project will simply end up just being a methane turbine — that LADWP will not be able to get hydrogen to the plant at a cost that makes sense for their operations, and this will just have been an $800-million project to reinvest in burning methane for decades to come,” Caretta said.
The utility said it is implementing many of the renewable technologies Caretta and others want through different projects such as the Eland solar and battery plant that recently went online in Kern County and is now flowing through the city’s grid.
Officials also pointed to a National Renewable Energy Laboratory analysis that concluded it is “difficult to identify economically viable and deployable alternatives to new combustion resources at the Scattergood location” given the deadline and need to maintain power reliability.
The analysis builds on the findings of the L.A. 100 study, a seminal report published in 2021 that outlined the city’s pathway to 100% clean energy, which identified green hydrogen as a potentially critical component of the city’s portfolio, particularly at times when wind and solar are insufficient to meet demand.
“It’s a good plan,” Jack Brouwer, director of the Clean Energy Institute at UC Irvine who served on the advisory board for the L.A. 100 study, said in a phone call ahead of Tuesday’s vote. “The Scattergood facility and some of the other coastal plants are part of the required infrastructure to enable L.A. 100 to become completely decarbonized and depolluted. It’s not even possible to do this without something there.”
However, Brouwer said he also would have liked to see an alternative plan that used hydrogen fuel cells — a more expensive option that would not produce NOx emissions.
“DWP is known around the world now as a leader in decarbonization, and their progress to date has been tremendous,” Brouwer said. “The whole world is watching.”
Indeed, the stakes are high for DWP to get Scattergood right. The city is operating at about 60% clean energy, and next month it will stop receiving electricity from the Intermountain Power Plant in Central Utah — effectively ending L.A.’s reliance on coal.
“The continued extensive public comment today — both in support and against this project — does show clearly how complex and challenging this transition to clean energy is,” DWP commissioner Nurit Katz during the meeting. “And the challenges that are still ahead of us as we address reliability, resilience, and equity and environmental concerns.”
The conversion is slated for completion by December 2029.
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