To the editor: Visitor contributor Dan Esposito is true: Southern California Gasoline Co.’s push for a hydrogen mix dangers locking us into one other pricey fossil-fuel detour (“Mixing hydrogen into fuel pipelines would enrich utilities and hurt Californians,” Feb. 16). It looks like regulators handing a quicker automobile to a driver with a historical past of crashes. After pipeline failures, explosions, methane leaks and the continuing Aliso Canyon catastrophe, we at the moment are being requested to belief the identical system with a extra risky gas and billions in new infrastructure.
In the meantime, the Los Angeles Division of Water and Energy is advancing plans to transform the Scattergood plant to burn a hydrogen mix at a projected price of no less than $800 million. Inexperienced hydrogen stays extraordinarily costly. Ratepayers will probably be left holding the invoice.
This buildout is proposed close to LAX and the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant, important infrastructure the place security ought to be paramount. As an alternative of accelerating distributed photo voltaic, storage and digital energy crops, leaders are doubling down on centralized combustion.
Scattergood sits by Dockweiler Seaside, closely utilized by working-class households and communities of coloration. Emissions would drift east towards Inglewood and Lennox, neighborhoods already overburdened by air pollution.
Hydrogen mixing just isn’t local weather management. It’s a bailout of stranded fuel belongings on the public’s expense.
Andrea Leon-Grossmann, Los Angeles
