Here’s what’s going on: Recently, Southern California Edison indicated that it’s probably not going to buy power from a cutting-edge Toyota fuel cell power plant because of how the renewable fuel for the plant would be delivered. To understand why this infuriatingly blocks key progress on renewable energy, you first have to understand the basics of how fuel cells work.
Bear with us.
A fuel cell uses hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a chemical reaction to create an electrical current. This process produces heat and water. So by themselves fuel cells do not emit carbon dioxide or other pollutants.
The problem is that most often we have to turn to natural gas to get hydrogen (hydrogen doesn’t occur by itself naturally, but it is found in natural gas). Now, of course, natural gas is a fossil fuel, so using it for fuel cells undermines the aim of creating a zero-carbon, pollution-free energy source.
But that’s not the entire story. It’s also possible to find hydrogen in biogas, which is made from plant or animal waste. Biogas is so similar to natural gas that it can be mixed into the natural gas pipeline system.
This is where Toyota’s fuel cell plan finds economic viability. The carmaker developed a plan to build a power plant that runs on fuel cells. This plant, while small by power plant standards, would be among the largest fuel cell plants in the world, and would power Toyota’s logistics operations at the Port of Long Beach, Calif., and provide hydrogen used by fuel cell tractor-trailers. Two things will help make this operation viable, according to Toyota. One, the company sells excess electricity to the local utility, Southern California Edison, and two, the power plant uses biogas piped in through the existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure.
And that, apparently, is a problem. Southern California Edison holds auctions to buy renewable power, and this new fuel cell plan isn’t likely to beat other types of established renewable power on price. That’s where a state biogas program comes in; California’s Public Utility Commission created a program for power plants that run on biogas to sell electricity to major utilities at a favorable rate. The idea is to develop this fledgling industry, similar to the way Texas developed wind energy through a favorable regulatory scheme.
The trouble is, Southern California Edison has expressed skepticism that biogas meets the criteria of the program if it is moved via natural gas pipelines.
Mind you, the beauty of biogas is that it can be made into a commodity, indistinguishable from natural gas, and usable in the various ways we have developed for natural gas without the need for specialized infrastructure. Moving biogas from farm to power plant via a pipeline is, in this instance, better than somehow trying to move manure to a power plant or co-locate the operations. Especially when the end user is at one of the world’s busiest ports, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. California has struggled to get biogas projects into the program, so it makes no sense to be rigid. When an investor comes up with a creative, if unexpected, approach to meeting policy goals, we Texans say go for it.
To clear all of this up and get the project back on track, Toyota has asked the California Public Utility Commission to irrefutably clarify whether biogas-in-pipelines qualifies for the program, though the commission has already indicated it does.
But in the meantime, let’s sum all of this up. California wants to lower carbon emissions. A major carmaker has invested in a plan that would bring a new technology forward on an industrial scale in the form of a power plant. The plant will essentially be run on biogas, which should make it eligible for a state incentive program that will make the economics of this new plant work out. But it’s all being held up now because a utility doesn’t like the fact that the biogas will be mixed with chemically identical natural gas. In other words, the fuel cell plant could die because it’s not using the exact gas it is having added to the pipeline.
This is another reason why California is failing. A puritanical view of environmentalism is killing the very projects that would enable it to both make progress and prove, on a mass scale, the viability of good ideas.
If we insist on abandoning fossil fuels entirely and move directly to renewable energy, we’ll never build the bridge to cleaner energy sources. Natural gas has been crucial in the shift in Texas toward wind and solar, providing back-up power when the sun and wind go away. Likewise, pipelines are crucial to developing a network of farmers who can see a financial benefit to investing in turning waste into biogas. For that to happen, those farmers will need to use existing pipelines.
It’s past time to recognize that pipelines are not the enemy. Something for California to ponder in the dark is that pipelines can help keep the lights on.
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