The Collapse of the Northeast’s Biggest Hydrogen Plant

In 2021, top elected officials in New York state promised that Plug Power, a nascent company in the growing hydrogen industry, would build a large hydrogen fuel production facility in the Buffalo-Rochester area. It was supposed to make the state an industry leader.

Today, the project is looking more like a warning sign about the perils of being a first-mover in the unproven hydrogen business.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Plug Power, an American hydrogen and fuel cell producer founded in 1997, believed it would capitalize on rising demand for the liquid fuel when it broke ground at its hydrogen production facility at Genesee County’s Science, Technology and Advanced Manufacturing Park in 2021, a project known colloquially as STAMP. Heavy polluting industries like steel and transportation were chomping at the bit to strike supply deals for hydrogen, a liquid fuel that produces no carbon when burned. And this New York plant would on paper be particularly attractive from a climate perspective: It would be powered by hydroelectric dams at Niagara Falls, offering a potential carbon reduction of an estimated 14,000 tons of CO2 per year. It would also be the largest project of its kind in the Northeast.

Three years later and the project appears to be on ice, according to a phone call recording between New York county officials and a real estate developer that was obtained by Heatmap News.

Construction stopped in January, per the call, as did work Plug Power promised to do on an electrical substation that will also power a neighboring semiconductor manufacturing plant. Now energy-hungry data center developers are bidding to pick up the substation work instead in exchange for a spot at STAMP and access to some of the remaining hydroelectricity, and county officials are looking at buying Plug Power’s electrical equipment.

It is unclear whether the hydrogen production plant will ever be completed.

“They’ve put things on hold and now we’re coming to pick up the pieces,” Chris Suozzi, an executive vice president at the Genessee County Economic Development Authority, told one bidder – PRP Real Estate Management – on a call last month. PRP taped the call and shared it with us after it was first reported by local news nonprofit InvestigativePost. Suozzi also said on the call: “They’re not ready to go. They’re on pause. We don’t know what’s going to happen with them at this point.”

The New York Plug Power plant’s problems should be familiar to anyone in the climate tech startup space but for the unfamiliar, the company’s rapid growth seems to have run headlong into struggles with cash. A year ago Plug Power said in an investor filing there was a “substantial” concern the company may not have “sufficient funds to fund [its] operations through the next 12 months.” So problematic are Plug’s financial woes that they’ve become a political target; after the Energy Department offered a $1.6 billion conditional loan commitment to Plug for building hydrogen production plants, Republicans in Congress called for an inspector general investigation into the move.

But the New York production facility won’t benefit from the potential loan either. We’ve learned from two sources familiar with the matter that the project is not included in its potential loan application currently pending before DOE.

Then there has been the rollout of the Inflation Reduction Act. Even though the project relies on carbon-free hydropower, it may not qualify for the IRA’s hydrogen production tax credit because of proposed requirements for fuel to rely on new renewable energy sources (known as “additionality”). This has been a major sticking point in implementation of the credit, and Plug Power is quoted in InvestigativePost last week linking the work stoppage at the production facility on waiting for the final regulation implementing the credit. This is even as the company uses the yet-to-be finalized credit in its financial analyses for other hydrogen facilities in operation today, like this one in Georgia.

Environmental justice issues have also been a drag on development. The native Tonawanda Seneca Nation is opposed to the entire industrial park because of the resulting impacts on wildlife, noise and the visual landscape. In April, the Fish and Wildlife Service revoked a necessary permit for a wastewater treatment pipeline that would be used by companies at the park.

Earthjustice attorney Alex Page – who is working with the Nation to fight the project – told me the tribe was told last year by the Energy Department that Plug Power had withdrawn the New York site from its loan application. The Nation will continue to fight the project and DOE’s loan financing to Plug Power on the chance that money could be reprogrammed to the industrial park. Page said: “The Nation remains very, very much opposed.”

We sent Plug Power multiple requests for comment as well as Suozzi. A representative for Plug Power declined to answer questions about the project. I got a text from a number listed for Suozzi asking to chat later, but I didn’t hear back before publication.