Mayor Bass and members of the Los Angeles City Council & POLA during their recent visit to the nation’s capital received notice from President Biden’s senior adviser Mitch Landrieu that California had been awarded $1.2 billion grant funding for hydrogen. We know, out of the 1.2 billion, a large sum will come to Los Angeles. This brings us one step closer in advancing our Clean Air goals.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) also was approved to receive $48 million in federal dollars to enhance LADWP’s grid flexibility, improve the resilience of the power system against growing threats of extreme weather and climate change, and ensure Los Angeles has access to affordable, reliable, clean electricity throughout all areas of the City.
Established by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the U.S Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office is administering a historic $10.5 billion investment via the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program to enhance grid flexibility, improve the resilience of the power system against growing threats of extreme weather and climate change, and ensure American communities have access to affordable, reliable, clean electricity when and where they need it.
The grant will help LADWP create one single platform where distributed energy resources like Electric Vehicles (EVs) and EV chargers, energy storage, solar photovoltaic systems (PV), and demand response infrastructure can be controlled, in response to grid needs. Doing so will enable LADWP to quickly rebalance the electrical system after an extreme climate event like wildfires, heatwaves or tropical storms.
Karen Bass: Good morning, everyone. This is a very exciting morning in Los Angeles and in [Council District] 15. Yesterday afternoon, President Biden’s senior adviser Mitch Landrieu gave me a call and he said that California had been awarded this $1.2 billion grant funding for hydrogen in the state of California. We know, out of the 1.2 billion, a large sum will come to Los Angeles. This brings us one step closer in advancing our Clean Air goals. This would not be possible without the state partners, Governor Newsom and ARCHES, [which] stands for the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems, for all of their efforts in putting the application together; and, the people standing with me today, who all play a part in our effort to accelerate Los Angeles toward our Clean Air goals like a zero emission port and a 100% clean energy LADWP.
Gene Seroka, the executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, and Aram Benyamin, chief operating officer for LADWP, who you will hear from shortly – standing behind me are important labor leaders and partners from ILWU 13, the Los Angeles Orange County Building Trades, IBEW and our marine terminal operators, all of whom will be putting this new hydrogen funding to use and cleaning and creating more jobs. Thank you for all of the work that you do to keep our port running and keep our lights and power on around Los Angeles.
Today is also a special day for California, for Los Angeles, the LADWP and for the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which together comprise the nation's largest seaport complex. The money we are receiving will help to create a hydrogen hub, which will further our efforts to help seed a robust green hydrogen market to assist in the pursuit of zero emission operations. We know that we must protect and improve the health of communities directly impacted by the port related missions and work toward a greener future while also ensuring that we create good paying clean jobs. And now the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach will receive a portion of the state funds to advance the use of hydrogen fuel in goods movement. This money will be given to the Port of LA to transition more trucks and cargo handling equipment to zero emissions and to LADWP as they convert one of their natural gas plants to a clean hydrogen plant. This is a team effort and together we are locking arms with the state and federal governments in order to create a cleaner and safer Los Angeles for all. Thank you all for being a part of this amazing funding opportunity and for playing a part in transforming Los Angeles. And now it's my pleasure to bring forward the councilman from the Great One Five, Councilman Tim McOsker.
Tim McOsker: Thank you very much, Mayor. My name is Tim McOsker, Councilman of the “One Five,” I'm proud to represent Watson harbor gateway and harbor city and Wilmington and my hometown of San Pedro, Today benefits not only the entirety of the One Five, the entirety of the city of Los Angeles, the entirety of the region, and the world.
So much has gone into this effort and there have been years and years of different community groups and nonprofits, our partners in labor the ILWU 1363 and our friends in the building trades… who have all leaned in to make sure that we could put together this application. Again, it's been businesses and labor and community groups working together. And I would want to point out Terry Taminen, who's the executive director of ALTASEA, here, who has also spent a lot of time, effort and work on this.
What today gives us is the opportunity to join with Mayors’ Richardson and Mayor Bass, and the leadership that they put together at the ports of Long Beach in POLA. The San Pedro Bay complex together working with community groups, and again, working with our partners and labor and working with our businesses can actually take another giant step towards decarbonization. And it's critically important for us to decarbonize the San Pedro Bay, it's also critically important for us to know, and we all know, that we do not have to choose between a good economy, good jobs and a clean environment. We can and we will do both. We will ensure both that our business partners and our labor partners are working together to make sure that we are cleaning up the environment and hanging on to these great jobs and building even more jobs. There's going to be a lot of work for the trades. There's going to be a lot of work for the women and men who move these goods. I could not be more excited and cautiously optimistic. We will get it right. So thank you, God bless you.
Karen Bass: Let me now bring up our Deputy Mayor for energy and sustainability. Nancy Sutley.
Nancy Sutley: Thank you very much, Mayor. And thank you all for being here. And thank you for this great day. There are a number of important projects in the city of Los Angeles that this hydrogen grant will help to support. In applying for this funding we committed to use green hydrogen, hydrogen that's derived from renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. We had the support of the City Council, DWP and POLA working together to secure this funding.
There's a number of projects that we expect this funding to support for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power; the modernization of its Scattergood generating station one of the oldest on its system; and LADWP is proceeding with its project to upgrade this power plant to hydrogen capable terminal turbans. It will provide relevant reliability, resiliency and clean energy; and, we expect it to be completed later this decade. The port projects working with the Port of Long Beach will use hydrogen in hard to electrify equipment to reduce smog and carbon pollution from cargo handling equipment, and then in later phases, trucks and ships. In this we've committed to the strongest environmental standards and working with the community.
And we will continue our extensive outreach with community based organizations, environmental organizations ensure everybody is a part of the process. We do this as part of ARCHES. ARCHES, California's hydrogen hub applicant, was created by the State of California as a public private partnership to develop a diverse portfolio of clean energy solutions. DOE noted that a major deployment cluster for the hydrogen hub will be here in Los Angeles, decarbonizing power plants, ports and trucks. And the ARCHES process is committed to providing community benefits, workforce development and high labor standards and has also committed to providing 40% of the funding to disadvantaged communities. So, we look forward to working together to continuing to work with ARCHES to ensure those projects are funded and are built here in Los Angeles. And it's my honor to introduce the executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, Gene Seroka. Thank you.
Gene Seroka: It is a great day for California, the city of Los Angeles and our port complex. Six years ago, at this very site, the cities and ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles announced the bold ambition to be the first in the world with zero emissions cargo handling equipment and zero emission trucks, and how far we've come.
Today's announcement truly is that major step toward the zero emission goal and for decarbonizing the entire maritime supply chain. Over the past five years, the port complex has been a hydrogen test lab, partnering with our tenants, longshore labor, original equipment manufacturers and the state of California to conduct demonstrations of zero emission hydrogen fuel cell electric equipment in demanding, real world conditions here at the port. With the funding being made available through the Department of Energy's hydrogen hub grant, these demonstrations and valuable lessons that we have learned will quickly evolve into wider port investment that will create immediate health benefits for our local and regional communities. And, give us the chance to accelerate this much needed green technology advancement.
I want to thank Secretary [Jennifer] Granholm, the entire Biden-Harris administration, Governor Newsom, Dee Dee Myers and all with GO-biz, along with the ARCHES participants in this statewide effort and, of course, our Los Angeles Mayor, Karen Bass, the city council, Councilman Mckosker for his efforts around that horseshoe, and the Department of Water and Power, the city and port of Long Beach, with which we are inextricably linked in this goal to be the first in the world to attempt this and accomplish the green technology.
With that, I'd like to introduce one of our key partners and friends. Aram Benyamin, who is the Chief Operating Officer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Thank you.
Aram Benyamin: Good morning, everyone. And Mayor bass, thank you for your leadership, you're making a huge difference in moving us to a zero carbon economy. I guarantee you we're gonna get there with the leadership and all the support that you see in this town. As we are moving towards a zero carbon economy. We have some really great milestone that I would I'm more than happy to report on: LA was 50% Coal 15 years ago. Next year, Los Angeles will be zero coal in the portfolio, we will be reducing more than 6 million tons of emissions. That's equivalent of taking more than million cars off the road by next year.
So, as we achieve that goal- a zero carbon economy, we are putting in the leading technology in Harbor, hydrogen creation and hydrogen use and very state of the art low emission turbans in one of the generating stations feeding the Los Angeles grid. As Deputy Mayor Sutley mentioned, we are re-powering the most polluting in basin generation. And we are on our way to procure over a billion dollars worth of state of the art equipment to make sure, as Gene noted, to support our plans for our entire operations in the south of the Los Angeles. We're also spending billions of dollars modernizing the grid and rewiring our system in order for us to be ready for the electrification and making sure our buildings, our transportation sector, and our infrastructure is ready to accept the transition to electric economy and we make sure that we get to 0% emission in every sector of our economies. And we'll provide that benefit to our residents and make sure that our city is leading not only United States, but we're leading the world in these technologies.
Lastly, I just want to thank the mayor, again, your leadership made this happen. And we guarantee that we will use those funds to take the pressure off of our ratepayers and accelerate our deployment. We will put that money to good use and we will get this thing done. And also thanks to Governor Newsom, our deputy mayor Nancy Sutley. Thank you for being here.