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The RMI federal policy manager and reality show star has some considered opinions on hydrogen.
Millions of Americans first met Washington, D.C., resident Taylor Krause when she appeared on Netflix’s dating show “Love Is Blind.” The series frames getting engaged as a type of matching problem, where contestants talk to each other, fall in love, and get engaged before they meet each other in person.
But here at Heatmap, we know Krause’s work because of a different type of matching problem: how to match clean hydrogen makers with new sources of clean electricity.
Krause works on the problem of decarbonizing heavy industry for the climate policy think tank RMI. Her team is wrapped up in a sprawling fight over how to regulate the clean hydrogen industry, a fight Heatmap followed keenly. The battle could determine how the government spends up to an estimated $100 billion in tax credits to incentivize the production of green hydrogen.
Treasury recently told Heatmap those regulations will be finalized by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the newest salvo in that fight — this being D.C., it took the form of a policy memo — was released on Monday by RMI. The white paper, coauthored by Krause, explains how developers could actually build clean hydrogen projects that are connected to the power grid while meeting the government’s stringent proposed standards.
It emerged in part from RMI’s collaboration with a “working group spanning developers, registries, and electricity forecasting experts,” according to the paper, and it proposes a series of ways hydrogen developers can meet the stringent “three pillars” standards the government has proposed. These rules would require that any electricity used to electrolyze water and extract hydrogen itself be produced by new zero-carbon sources during the same time period it’s used, and on the same power grid as the electrolyzer.
This three-step approach aims to keep the generous hydrogen tax credit from creating higher electricity prices across the power grid and generating more emissions than the hydrogen produced will mitigate, but it has been criticized by some companies for being too arduous and complicated to comply with. (Some hydrogen makers, such as the industrial gas-making giant Air Products, support the three pillars approach.)
One of the biggest topics the new memo tackles is the problem of buying clean electricity. If America regulates the clean hydrogen industry as the Biden administration has proposed, then eventually hydrogen companies will need to buy electricity credits from a “registry” — a company that can guarantee the power the hydrogen companies bought actually complies with the rules.
Those registries don’t exist right now. Until they do, the new memo argues, hydrogen makers should go straight to the source and solve the “matching problem” by contracting directly with a newly built solar, wind, or zero-carbon power source, using a two-way deal like a power purchase agreement, Nathan Iyer, a senior associate at RMI and co-author of the paper, told me. (Krause didn’t have time to talk.)
In other words: If you’re a clean hydrogen maker trying to buy electricity to power your electrolyzer, then love — or at least your procurement budget — should not be blind. Good to know. The memo ticks through a few other myths about the new standards that Krause and Iyer want to debunk. It’s a good reminder that while there might be no rules in love and war, there are more than 100 pages of proposed rules for taking advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean hydrogen production tax credit.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.