Techno-economic Assessment of Hydrogen as a Decarbonization Measure for California’s Electric System

Project Innovation

The goal of this project is to assess the role of hydrogen production and conversion technologies to enable decarbonization of end-use electric sector applications in California. This study includes developing a dataset of what geologic formations in California could enable low-cost hydrogen storage; developing new datasets for projected costs and performance of hydrogen technologies from production to end-use; and developing new computational tools to determine the optimal configuration of hydrogen production, storage, transport and end-use equipment to serve California’s decarbonizing electric sector. Using these updated tools, E3 will explore a number of sensitivities to clarify in which sectors and in which applications hydrogen is most cost competitive. These sensitivities will provide insight into where support is needed along the hydrogen lifecycle to increase or achieve cost competitiveness.