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"Based on SDG&E’s own projections of revenue requirements and continuing hydrogen production at current levels, the levelized cost of green hydrogen from PDDP is $643.71 per kg which compares very unfavorably to publicly-available projections of $4.60 - $20 per kg."

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The expert for the consumer advocates at TURN did the math and showed that costs for this project are so high, it's almost comical...

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Just Say No Campaign Message

The claimed benefits of this scheme are vanishingly small – it would periodically displace 0.31% of the facility’s dependence on fossil gas. The CPUC can reject this request and reserve RD&D funding for real solutions to California’s air quality, climate, and affordability crises.

static.klipy.com

ALT: Just Say No Campaign Message

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Sara Gersen @saragersen.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

On Friday, I filed testimony on behalf of the California Environmental Justice Alliance opposing SDG&E’s big hydrogen boondoggle. SDG&E wants >$30m from customers for producing hydrogen and burning it in a gas-fired power plant.

SDG&E's Palomar Energy Center, where the company produces hydrogen and uses it in a gas-fired power plant.

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This week, the California Public Utilities Comm'n rejected an unprecedented money-grab from SoCalGas. SoCalGas tried to force its residential and small business customers to fund development of a hydrogen pipeline system that those customers would never use. I represented Sierra Club in this case.

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Sara Gersen @saragersen.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

I believe SoCalGas is the only gas utility in the US greedy enough to expect its captive customers to pay for it to launch a new hydrogen business. I represent Sierra Club in the case.

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Sara Gersen @saragersen.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Friday, the California PUC proposed rejecting SoCalGas’ request to charge its gas customers $266 million to design a hydrogen pipeline that won't directly benefit them. If the PUC adopts the proposed decision, it will be a much-needed win for affordability in CA. docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDoc...

docs.cpuc.ca.gov

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Reposted by Sara Gersen

Canary Media Inc. @canarymedia.com · 05/05/2025

To fast-track recovery after wildfires ravaged Los Angeles County in January, Mayor Karen Bass issued an executive order exempting replacement structures from the city's all-electric building requirement. A new report argues that’s the wrong approach:

ow.ly

After LA fires, could it be cheaper and faster to rebuild without gas?

The city waived its all-electric building requirement in an effort to fast-track recovery after the January fires. A new report argues that’s the wrong…

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Reposted by Sara Gersen

UCLA Emmett Institute @uclalawemmett.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Explainer: Using ISRs to fight air pollution from mega facilities This new report by Brennon Mendez and Cara Horowitz in the Pritzker Brief series from @law.ucla.edu focuses on how to use Indirect Source Rules to fight pollution from mega facilities.

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Reposted by Sara Gersen

Matt Vespa @missionvespa.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Berkeley continues to innovate with first-in-nation time of sale ordinance to cut pollution from existing buildings. Still lots cities can do to end reliance on fossil fuels! www.kqed.org/news/1203655...

kqed.org

Berkeley Policy Aims to Cut Pollution From Homes, and Targets the Moment You Sell (or Buy) | KQED

The new policy requires that one- to four-unit buildings undergo upgrades that reduce planet-warming emissions around the time a structure is sold.

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Yeah, whether this makes sense depends largely on what the purpose of the program is. Is the LCFS an offset program or a California fuel program, as CARB generally claims? IMO, CA is squandering scarce resources on paper credits when we need to truly modernize the state's transportation sector.

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No, the program is supposed to decarbonize CA transportation fuels and transform the market. You can't do that by buying offsets for out-of-state reductions in other sectors. It would be just as misguided to give electric utilities a pass from RPS compliance by buying carbon offsets.

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No. Californians are paying a lot of money to clean up the state's transportation sector and they're not getting what they pay for. Fixing the LCA doesn't fix that problem.

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There are also big Qs about whether there's any climate benefit from using methane from factory farms instead of fossil gas. We don't know how much biomethane is produced to take advantage of these kinds of subsidies and the biomethane supply chain is even leakier than the fossil gas supply chain.

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I assume the people who buy the biomethane are in Missouri. It's hard to argue that the CA subsidies are causing fossil gas displacement - if you check out the full WaPo article, it gets into how the CAFO already captured biomethane before the LCFS subsidies.

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a man in a suit and tie is making a really ? face .

Companies that sell fossil methane in CA buy paper credits from factory farms in Missouri. These credits give the fossil fuel industry the right to pretend they are selling biomethane in CA for the sake of claiming huge subsidies. It might seem too stupid to be true, but that's how the LCFS works.

media.tenor.com

ALT: a man in a suit and tie is making a really ? face .

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California’s pig fart program helps out-of-state farms more

This Washington Post video touches on a lot of profound problems with California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard, but it oversimplifies one key thing. The cow gas is not delivered to CA. It does nothing to reduce the climate impact of the fuels we use here. 1/2 www.youtube.com/shorts/j5kms...

youtube.com

YouTube video by Washington Post Universe

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Sara Gersen @saragersen.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

Demand for these manure gas credits is about to skyrocket because of bad federal policy. The federal government is allowing the fossil fuel industry to reap big tax subsidies for producing hydrogen, provided they buy these paper credits to recharacterize their fossil fuels as "renewables."

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Sara Gersen @saragersen.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

I replaced my gas water heater with a heat pump model at the beginning of March and now have about a month of data on my home's fossil fuel usage after the water heater upgrade. Now, my SoCal home is zero-emissions most days, unless we're burning gas to dry laundry. 🏘️⚡🔌💧

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Reposted by Sara Gersen

Adrian Martinez @lasmogguy.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

This is an important case. Big ups to Earthjustice colleagues (@candyoungblood.bsky.social), @sierraclub.org, @industriouslabs.bsky.social ( @evangillespie.bsky.social ), and Peoples Collective 4 EJ. The zero-emissions shift is happening and we will go to court to defend our right to clean air.

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Reposted by Sara Gersen

Matt Vespa @missionvespa.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

Thank you @benallenca.bsky.social & Sen Stern for asking @californiapuc.bsky.social for answers on costs of building back with gas, ways it can facilitate all-electric construction, and role of gas line fires in complicating firefighting. We need a proactive PUC to enable thoughtful rebuilding.

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Reposted by Sara Gersen

Sammy Roth @sammyroth.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

Why are Karen Bass & Gavin Newsom rushing to rethink clean energy rules in the wake of the L.A. fires? Rebuilding homes with gas furnaces won't be any cheaper or faster. If anything, all-electric homes are the best thing for everyone. My @latimes.com column: www.latimes.com/environment/...

latimes.com

Column: The Los Angeles fires are no excuse to slow down on clean energy

State and local officials seem to be rushing to rethink climate policies. It's a terrible idea.

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Sara Gersen @saragersen.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Today, Sierra Club and @ceja.org protested SoCalGas’ request to charge customers $266 million to design a hydrogen pipeline system. The CPUC has told SoCalGas multiple times recently it can’t make customers pay for Sempra’s new lines of business that don’t directly benefit us. But here we go again!

media.tenor.com

two cartoon characters standing next to each other with the words here they go again written below them

ALT: two cartoon characters standing next to each other with the words here they go again written below them

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Reposted by Sara Gersen

Earthjustice @earthjustice.org · 21/01/2025

Earthjustice President Abbie Dillen said it best: People want policies that safeguard clean air and clean water and protect them from climate-fueled extreme weather. The President's job is to protect the people, not corporate interests.

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Luckily, the statute requires New Mexico's clean transportation fuel standard to reduce the carbon intensity of fuels "used in the state," so the state's environment department must nix these book-and-claim accounting shenanigans in the final rule.

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a man drinking through a straw from a cup that says 7 eleven

Will the New Mexico Clean Transportation Fuel Standard become a giant straw that sucks money from New Mexicans to California's refineries and Wisconsin's dairies for fuels that provide no in-state benefits?

media.tenor.com

ALT: a man drinking through a straw from a cup that says 7 eleven

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One big loophole that is unique to the New Mexico draft is letting all fuels take advantage of "book-and-claim" accounting. Companies that continue business-as-usual and sell fossil diesel in NM could claim a subsidy by buying paper credits from companies that supply renewable diesel in California.

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These oils are sold in a global commodity market, interchangeable with palm oil. So, one straightforward fix would be to assume that increasing demand for any crop oil has the same land-use impacts as increasing demand for palm oil, which is too carbon-intensive to claim a subsidy.

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NM's proposal would also rely on CA's decade-old assessment of the climate benefits of crop oils, which neglects deforestation risks. A recent EPA study found that emissions from increasing production of these biofuels could be even worse for the climate than fossil fuels.

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The special treatment for manure gas is even *less* justified in New Mexico than in CA because livestock operations there generally don't store manure in the types of lagoons that generate methane for capture. Commodifying methane just encourages them to switch to dirtier practices to make CH4.

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Just like in CA, NM proposes to treat gas from livestock manure as "carbon negative", lavishing bigger subsidies on fuels made from ag waste than any other fuels. This is a big market distortion that rewards fueling with manure gas with about 4x the subsidy you'd see for electric fuels.

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Sara Gersen @saragersen.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Right now, we need states to lead on climate. Sadly, New Mexico's draft Clean Transportation Fuel Standard won't truly deliver the emissions reductions required by law because shabby carbon accounting rewards biofuels for reductions that only exist on paper. We filed comments on how to fix it!

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Good question for the bluesky brain trust. I believe there's no need for fuel producers to calculate their CI under the RFS and all renewable fuels generate one RIN for each 1 gallon equivalent.

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Sara Gersen @saragersen.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

The over-subsidization of manure gas in our climate programs is the product of industrial agriculture's relatively recent political victories at CARB. I think it's important people understand it's not the result of some longstanding or inevitable consensus.

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Sara Gersen @saragersen.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Good article on the new rules for the federal hydrogen tax credits. My one quibble is with the suggestion that manure methane has "long been treated as 'carbon negative.'" The LCFS has only treated manure gas as a magical "carbon negative" fuel since 2018.

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Sigh, if only it were as easy to clean up the electricity sector as waving your hands at the cap-and-trade program. A lot of us could go enjoy mai tais on the beach if the invisible hand of California's carbon market were solving this one.

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Maybe the next IRP cycle could authorize additional renewable procurements if the PUC thought cap-and-trade revenue would > the cost of the renewables? In the best-case (and very speculative) scenario, those resources deploy in the 2030s, long after the feds start doling out hydrogen tax credits.

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And what would it even look like, in practice, for the cap-and-trade program to somehow abate the emissions that the hydrogen industry will induce on the grid? It's hard to fathom it happening this decade.

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In fact, the experts who monitor cap-and-trade in California have raised loud alarms that a glut of credits will allow pollution beyond the "cap" in coming years. lao.ca.gov/Publications...

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Since California's cap-and-trade program started more than a decade ago, it's never been a driver of emissions reductions in the electricity sector. Nobody has explained why we should expect that to suddenly change.

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This loophole is for states with strong renewable portfolio standards *and* cap-and-trade programs. The theory is that cap-and-trade will prevent grid emissions from rising when the hydrogen industry ramps up its energy demand. This is pretty far-fetched if you're familiar with CA's program...

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Sara Gersen @saragersen.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

The Treasury Dept gave two reasons for exempting CA and WA from the normal clean energy rules for the hydrogen tax credit, and it's been nagging at me that my thread on Friday only addressed why one of those rationales is wrong...

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With your focus on California, I wanted to make sure you're aware of what that national story leaves out: unjustified exemptions for CA and WA from the rule's general clean electricity standards. bsky.app/profile/sara...

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To be fair, this isn't a worse case scenario for CA. Industry wanted to get rid of time-matching requirements so they could, eg, claim to "use" solar energy at midnight. If the Biden admin had agreed, it'd spur huge new 24/7 loads and the type of chaos we're seeing with data centers elsewhere.

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There is already an energy affordability crisis in California. The Newsom administration and its ARCHES hydrogen hub lobbied for a loophole in federal law that will exacerbate this crisis. Today, I'm sad to learn that they got their way.

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As for energy affordability... existing solar and wind farms become cash cows for generating hydrogen tax credits. We used to assume utilities would negotiate new low-cost contracts with these clean generators when their PPAs end. Now, they'll have to bid against the H2 industry, spiking prices.

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