Minnesota Green Hydrogen Facility Registers Certificates on Renewable Thermal Tracking Platform

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 26, 2023

CenterPoint Energy, Minnesota’s largest natural gas utility, has registered a green hydrogen facility on the M-RETS renewable thermal tracking system to track renewable thermal certificates.  

CenterPoint Energy’s facility, which began operations in 2022, is the first-ever green hydrogen facility to register with a tracking system in North America and the company is receiving the nation’s first RTCs issued for green hydrogen, M-RETS said.

In an interview with Public Power Current, Ben Gerber, President and CEO of M-RETS, noted that M-RETS is a renewable energy tracking system. Along with a tracking platform for renewable thermal certificates, M-RETS also offers a renewable energy certificate tracking platform.

RTCs are a tool that represents the environmental attributes associated with renewable natural gas and other renewable thermal commodities, including green hydrogen.

CenterPoint Energy plans to retire the RTCs generated from its green hydrogen facility on behalf of its customers.

CenterPoint Energy’s green hydrogen system in Minneapolis uses renewable electricity and purified water to produce 60 dekatherms of hydrogen within a 24-hour period. The green hydrogen is added to natural gas in a portion of the utility’s local distribution pipeline system, reducing the carbon impact of the gas when burned.

M-RETS said that it created its renewable thermal tracking system in 2020 “to increase transparency, spur market development for industries that cannot be electrified, and provide the value and liquidity necessary to support renewable thermal projects.”

“With new incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, green hydrogen-producing facilities will grow,” Gerber said in a news release related to the CenterPoint announcement. “This is an important step to establishing the market.”

When asked to elaborate on the new incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, Gerber told Public Power Current that the law includes a provision that provides up to a $3/kilogram incentive for producing clean hydrogen, which “really starts putting it into a cost-competitive territory for decarbonizing the gas system.” Specifically, the Inflation Reduction Act includes a clean hydrogen production tax credit of up to $3 per kilogram.

Additional information about M-RETS is available here.

Public Power and Green Hydrogen

A report available to members of the American Public Power Association offers details on where the emerging hydrogen market is in the U.S. and globally, what is driving the growing interest in hydrogen and what obstacles are preventing hydrogen technology from being able to scale-up. The report is available here.