Are California’s existing renewable energy policies strong enough to take on the demands of hydrogen production without straining the grid? The question lies at the center of the debate around clean hydrogen in the state; it emerged today in an Assembly committee hearing on building a hydrogen economy. … “You can operate mostly in the middle of the day, and as a result, have way lower carbon emissions than the average grid,” Jack Brouwer, director of University of California, Irvine’s Clean Energy Institute, there representing ARCHES, [the state’s hydrogen hub] said on a committee panel.

Distributed power production could also reduce the need for transmission lines in high risk areas allow “local production of renewable electricity, for example distributed solar and battery energy storage. Those are also very important technologies for avoiding wildfires,” said Jack Brouwer, an engineering professor at the University of California, Irvine. The director of the university’s National Fuel Cell Research Center, Brouwer says new fuel cell technology, similar to that being introduced in cars, can create more local generation.