A plan to convert L.A.’s largest natural-gas-fired power plant, located on the beach near LAX, to a purported cleaner-burning fuel has drawn the ire of an unlikely opponent: environmentalists.
A lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court by a coalition of environmental groups accuses the city of Los Angeles and the Department of Water and Power of violating the California Environmental Quality Act when it signed off on a plan for the Scattergood Generating Station in Playa del Rey last year.
For the record:
12:15 p.m. Sept. 10, 2026An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Physicians for Social Responsibility – LA as Physicians for Social Responsibility. The story has been changed to reflect the correct name.
The $800-million plan would replace two of the plant’s aging units with turbines that can run on a combination of natural gas and hydrogen, which, when produced cleanly, generates no planet-warming carbon dioxide. The DWP has said the plan is integral to meeting L.A.’s climate goals, including 100% clean energy by 2035.
But the lawsuit from the nonprofits Communities for a Better Environment, the Sierra Club, the Los Angeles Waterkeeper, Food and Water Watch and Physicians for Social Responsibility — LA says the plan doesn’t adequately define or analyze the project as required by CEQA. What’s more, they say, it will ultimately prolong the life of L.A.’s fossil fuel infrastructure.
“It’s framed very much as this beneficial, clean, environmentally positive project, and from our perspective, it looks a lot more like the city is investing very close to a billion dollars to keep a methane gas plant on line,” said Theo Caretto, staff attorney at Communities for a Better Environment.
The lawsuit is one of two challenging the city’s plan. A second one, filed last week by the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, makes similar claims.
Much of their consternation stems from the fact that the DWP plan provides no specifics about where the hydrogen will come from, or how the highly combustible material will be transported to the power plant and stored there. “The green hydrogen that would supply the proposed project has not yet been identified,” the DWP wrote in its environmental impact report.
That could put it at odds with CEQA, which is intended to inform the public or decision-makers about foreseeable impacts, said Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, who is not involved in the lawsuits.
“So if the project description is not including how much hydrogen will be burned on-site, or using a best-case scenario of hydrogen that masks the worst case of fossil-gas-only combustion, DWP is not providing some important information to nearby residents,” Elkind said.
He noted that when the project was envisioned, the energy landscape was vastly different, and the price of hydrogen has not come down as hoped. At the same time, the price of alternatives such as solar and battery energy storage has plummeted and they are “now widely deployed in California and beyond to help stabilize the grid and meet peak power demand, which is ostensibly the role that this power plant is supposed to play.”
Indeed, hydrogen has hit a number of stumbling blocks in recent years. President Trump ended a federal tax credit for clean hydrogen production and terminated billions of dollars in funding for hydrogen projects in several states — including $1.2 billion for California’s hydrogen hub, the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems, which was awarded under President Biden.
This year, Southern California Gas Co. abandoned its plan for a hydrogen pipeline to the L.A. Basin, the Angeles Link Project, after state regulators said the utility couldn’t make ratepayers pay for it.
It now seems “very unlikely” that there will be a robust supply of hydrogen in time for the DWP’s 2029 deadline, said Caretto, the attorney — and “if there’s no hydrogen there, then this has to operate on methane.”
DWP officials said they can’t comment on pending legislation. But Jason Rondou, the agency’s interim chief operating officer and senior assistant general manager of the power system, said it is “theoretically possible” that the Scattergood units will have to run on 100% natural gas if no hydrogen supply is available by 2030.
“The reality is that some of this does depend on hydrogen infrastructure,” he said.
But he stood by the project, saying that it will be an important source of local electricity — not imported from outside L.A. — and will help maintain affordability and reliability for the region, particularly during extreme heat that strains the city’s power grid, such as the current high temperatures. He pointed to a study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that found it would be “infeasible” to reach those goals through noncombustion alternatives at Scattergood.
At the same time, the DWP has invested $5 billion in new clean energy projects in the last two years, including solar and battery energy storage, Rondou said. The city reached 65% renewable energy last year and is on track for 80% by 2030.
He said the DWP can’t control what happens to the hydrogen industry. But should it take off, he said, “we are going to have equipment that is ready to utilize it.”
In other energy news
Global oil prices are once again skyrocketing as the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran nears its seventh month. Brent crude climbed to more than $100 a barrel on Wednesday for the first time since July amid escalating attacks around the Strait of Hormuz, as well as Houthi rebels’ attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure near the Red Sea. It’s a nearly 40% increase since the start of the war in late February.
As a result, gasoline prices are also soaring, with the U.S. averaging about $4.22 a gallon, and $5.88 a gallon in California, according to AAA. But the real story is diesel, which climbed to a record $5.94 a gallon on Wednesday and $7.87 in California. The higher fuel costs are squeezing business in the Golden State, where our massive trucking and agricultural sectors rely heavily on diesel to power equipment, my colleagues Clara Harter and Suhauna Hussain recently reported.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Interior Department has tapped Michael Olsen, an energy advisor with a background in both oil and gas and renewables, to lead the Trump administration’s new offshore energy agency, the Marine Minerals Administration, which has helped kill offshore wind projects, Politico reported. The agency represents a merger of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement and will “increase efficiencies” for offshore leasing, including offshore oil drilling. Olsen previously worked at the Interior Department during the George W. Bush administration and later worked in offshore wind and oil and gas development.
In other climate news
About that heat wave: Temperatures in Southern California climbed into the triple digits Wednesday, but the unusual humidity is what got most of the attention. A combination of high heat and a deep-tropical air mass has created some of the worst humidity the region has experienced in the modern era, climate scientist Daniel Swain told my colleague Rong-Gong Lin II.
It’s likely just a preview of what’s to come as this year’s “super” El Niño gains strength and threatens to bring major rain and damage to the coast. A new study of nearly 1,000 years of coral records indicates that human-caused climate change is making El Niño — an already powerful climate phenomenon — even worse.
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