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In efforts to prevent a repeat of the February disaster that left millions without electricity, Texas policymakers continue to disagree over the cause and appropriate mitigation efforts. The blackouts from the storm led to spikes in power prices and the deaths of at least 151 people.
Republican leadership was quick to criticize renewables for the role they played in the blackouts, with Gov. Greg Abbott, R, claiming on national television that renewables caused the outages. They cannot be dispatched by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and therefore cannot be relied upon, said state Sen. Kelly Hancock, R, who chairs the Senate Business and Commerce committee. Hancock sponsored Senate Bill (SB) 1278, which would impose reliability costs on intermittent generation.
Dive Brief:
HyDeal Los Angeles, a green hydrogen initiative launched in Los Angeles on Monday, aims to bring the cost of hydrogen fuel to $1.50/kg by 2028. At that price, electricity from hydrogen-fired turbines would run about $35/MWh, estimates the Green Hydrogen Coalition, which launched the cooperative initiative.
In the project s first phase, set to take place over the next three months, the partners plan to identify potential industrial-scale applications for green hydrogen in the LA Basin and develop an infrastructure plan to connect them to hydrogen production and storage. Our hypothesis is, in a strategically targeted location, if you can aggregate offtakers you can scale up faster, said Janice Lin, founder and president of the Green Hydrogen Coalition. You can afford the infrastructure and reduce cost substantially.
Published May 13, 2021 Catherine Morehouse, Utility Dive
The following is a contributed article by Jeremy Fisher, Senior Advisor for Strategic Research and Development, Environmental Law Program, The Sierra Club
Rural electric cooperatives hold a unique place in the U.S. electric sector. Authorized under the Rural Electrification Act (REA) of 1936, the formation of non-profit electric cooperatives is a lasting legacy of the last New Deal. Unfortunately, federal support of these cooperatives has not kept up with the times, and today rural utilities hold a disproportionate amount of uneconomic coal in the United States.
With that in mind, we ve put a proposal on the table to use federal dollars to ease the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy at cooperatives and coal communities by injecting $12.5 billion of clean energy dollars into rural economies, with an additional $2.5 billion for plant and coal mine communitie