Today, as part of a nationwide movement by cities and counties to generate their own clean, locally-sourced power, renewable hydrogen solutions producer Ways2H and municipal energy consultancy Local Power announced a partnership to integrate onsite renewable hydrogen into community microgrids. The move reflects an evolution of Local Power’s Community Choice Aggregation blueprint for community microgrids that includes solar with storage, and now hydrogen produced from post-consumer waste, to decarbonize and strengthen communities’ resiliency.
About 1,500 U.S. municipalities, representing 30 million Americans, provide Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) service and many are looking for new sources of local, affordable, reliable, renewable, resilient electricity generation. Local Power and Ways2H will meet this demand with advanced microgrids powered by zero-emission renewable hydrogen-fueled generators, solar power, battery storage and heating automation. The projects will include sustainable waste disposal through Ways2H’s hydrogen production facilities, which use municipal solid waste, plastic and other refuse as a feedstock.
“Our goal is to help local governments build affordable renewable energy microgrids to power their communities and critical infrastructure, from hospitals to schools, energy-critical businesses and resilience hubs for residents regardless of utility blackouts,” said Local Power Founder and President Paul Fenn, who pioneered the CCA model that has spread across the United States in the past decade, and municipal Green Bond financing, now a trillion-dollar global industry. “We’re tying together key components of the climate problem — energy, decarbonization and resiliency — and removing grid barriers to deploy local energy generation.”
Ways2H and Paul Fenn at Local Power are partnering to develop community microgrids powered by renewable hydrogen produced from waste, plus solar and battery storage to help Community Choice Aggregators and municipalities increase resiliency. Ways2H’s waste-to-hydrogen process is zero net-carbon by itself and carbon-negative when paired with carbon capture and storage.
Renewable hydrogen-fueled microgrids will help local governments reach their climate and renewable energy goals, reduce the cost of resiliency and serve communities daily and during utility grid blackouts due to extreme weather such as wildfires and powerful storms. Using locally generated waste to produce clean hydrogen will further reduce municipalities’ costs for waste disposal.
Local Power and Ways2H will support municipalities’ use of Green Bonds or other financing options for the projects.
“We are bringing an integrated approach and a concrete solution that we believe many municipalities are looking for, as they seek technology and resiliency they currently don’t have,” said Ways2H CEO Jean-Louis Kindler. “Our waste-to-hydrogen production units are modular, transportable and easily installed onsite, close to where waste is produced and where hydrogen fuel is needed for distributed power generation and mobility.”
CCAs are active in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island and Virginia.
About Ways2H
Ways2H, Inc. is a global team that applies an advanced thermochemical process to convert waste biomass into renewable hydrogen, with a net zero-carbon footprint. The company’s patented process extracts hydrogen from the world’s worst waste streams – municipal solid waste, medical refuse, plastics and organics – without incineration to produce clean fuel for mobility and power generation. A joint venture between U.S.-based Clean Energy Enterprises and Japan Blue Energy Corporation, Ways2H is a unique solution for the global $400 billion+ solid waste management market and the rapidly growing hydrogen economy, estimated to reach $2.5 trillion by 2050. Please visit us at www.Ways2H.com.
About Local Power
Local Power (LocalPower.com) has spent the last 25 years creating a new energy market based on local municipal control called Community Choice Aggregation (CCA), which has been authorized in nine U.S states comprising about half of U.S. power demand. Founder Paul Fenn created the CCA model in the 1990s and invented Municipal Green Bonds to allow CCAs to finance energy localization. He developed the CCA 2.0 strategy for CCAs to optimize transitions from grid power to local renewable power that helped 67 U.S. cities and counties achieve 100% clean/renewable energy. In 2020, Local Power introduced the CCA 3.0 strategy for municipalities to decarbonize, generate their own independent renewable energy and increase their climate resiliency.
SOURCE Ways2H, Inc.
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