Comments on EPIC Program Policy and Innovation Coordination Group Partnership Area Framework Presentation
On April 24, the CHBC submitted comments to the CEC on the EPIC Program Policy and Innovation Coordination Group (PICG) Partnership Area Framework results workshop. The primary points are summarized below:
- A growing number of financial analysts agree that renewable hydrogen has great potential to be cost competitive as volume increases and that this could be imminent with the falling cost of renewable power, but policy support is also needed to enable economies of scale.
- UC Irvine has been developing a roadmap for how to achieve cost effective renewable hydrogen in California, which includes several specific recommendations for policy support, including research and development, which we highly encourage the EPIC program to consider.
- Support for renewable hydrogen aligns with several state laws and policies that also ought to be kept in view while developing upcoming EPIC programs.
- Zero carbon hydrogen also is needed to achieve zero greenhouse gas, zero criteria pollutant multi-day back up generation and microgrid power, which can be accomplished at mass scale by using green electrolytic hydrogen in fuel cells.
- The EPIC program also ought to consider supporting research and development to produce renewable hydrogen from biowaste feedstock, including but not necessarily limited to heeding the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recommendation to produce hydrogen by gasifying woody biomass, in order to cost effectively achieve California’s negative carbon emissions goal.