Utilities
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Lead Your Sustainability Initiatives
Natural gas and electric utilities, like most businesses and institutions, are on a quest to decarbonize. Many have set goals to dramatically reduce their carbon footprint, with projected billions in capital expenditures necessary to reduce a utility’s carbon footprint by up to 50%.
Fuel cells are a quantum leap in utility decarbonization. The impact of fuel cells on utility carbon reduction is dramatic – for both the utility and its residential and business customers.
Utilities and Decarbonization: A Data-Driven Decision
Clean power from combustion-free fuel cells running on natural gas, blended natural gas & hydrogen, and eventually pure hydrogen can significantly help natural gas and electric utilities address their goals for Scope 3 emissions by increasing the adoption of fuel cells in homes, businesses, and institutions.
To document/model the carbon reductions from fuel cell adoption, WATT applied the eGRID for Environmental Footprinting of Electricity Purchases, which is published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Air Markets Division (CAMD). eGRID and related tools (e.g., Power Profiler) provide the public with a comprehensive inventory of air emissions from the U.S. electric power sector.
Calculations for a Mid-Atlantic Natural Gas Utility and a Pacific Northwest Natural Gas utility yielded avoided emissions using both fuel cells and hybrid (with solar) fuel cells. The data shows that avoided generation emissions and avoided line loss emissions (power lost during transmission over power lines – it’s generated but never used) are significant.
The charts below demonstrate attractive opportunities to lever fuel cells for those utilities to achieve net zero GHG emissions with achievable customer adoption rates.
Interested? Contact your OEM/Utility with inquiries.
Utility Rate Recovery
As fuel cells progressively prove their performance across a range of applications, utilities will have the opportunity to work with regulators to build the cost of residential installations into the customer rate base, along with more traditional capital expenditures such as standard equipment upgrades and pipeline replacement and/or expansion.
One Power Source. Unlimited Possibilities.