In the Great Basin desert, far from Sacramento or Los Angeles City Hall, a cluster of smokestacks and drilling rigs has turned a small farming community into one of the most closely watched energy experiments on the planet. The political choices California made to get off coal did not just reshape its own grid, they rewired the future of a town in central Utah and helped create a new hub for hydrogen and long duration storage. I see in that unlikely partnership a preview of how climate policy, local resistance and technological bets will collide across the West in the next decade.
Delta, Utah, once known mainly for alfalfa fields and a county fair, now sits at the center of a multistate power system that keeps the lights on in Southern California and could soon store renewable energy for days at a time. The story of how California politics turned this tiny town into a global energy player runs through a single complex: the Intermountain Power Project, and the decision to transform it from a coal plant into a hydrogen ready engine for the clean energy transition.
The coal plant that tied Delta to Los Angeles
For decades, the Intermountain Power Project, or IPP, was a classic coal era bargain: Utah hosted the plant and its jobs, while Los Angeles bought most of the electricity. Since the 1980s, The Intermountain Power Project has been a key source of reliable, dispatchable energy for Los Angeles, feeding power from the Great Basin into the grid of The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. In the words of Ward, a longtime advocate for the project, “California got 40 years of good, reliable baseload electricity. The Utahns had a stable employer and tax base that anchored life in a town of just a few thousand people.
That arrangement, however, was always politically fragile. When Utah’s Intermountain Power Plant sold its electricity to Southern California, utilities there had to pay an extra $15 per megawatt hour under California’s climate rules, a cost that sharpened pressure to move away from coal. Critics in Utah argued that When Utah lawmakers saw those charges, they questioned whether California climate policies were unfair to Utah and even raised the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Yet the economic leverage was clear: as California ratcheted up its standards, the coal units in DELTA, UTAH, at what was Utah’s largest coal fired power plant, the Intermountain Power Project, were destined to run less and less.
California’s anti‑coal pivot and the “IPP Renewed” workaround
California’s decision to go coal free did not just happen in Sacramento hearing rooms, it landed squarely on the contract that bound Los Angeles to IPP. As state rules tightened, Now, for the first time, none of LA’s power comes from coal, and There is a political hiccup with IPP, since the Republican controlled Utah Legislature has not always shared California’s climate priorities. Earlier debates in Salt Lake City featured Utah legislators fighting the removal of a power plant, with hearings that focused on the Intermountain facility in Delta Utah State and what its closure would mean for local jobs.
Instead of walking away, California re signed a contract in 2015 called “IPP Renewed” with 21 Utah municipalities through 2077, a move that allowed the state to comply with its own anti coal regulations while keeping a foothold in the project. California used IPP Renewed to bet on a different fuel mix, in hopes Mitsubishi would transform the site into a natural gas and hydrogen plant that could eventually align with clean energy mandates. Dubbed IPP Renewed, the plan, as the Intermountain Power Agency describes it, includes retirement of the existing coal fueled units at the IPP site and installation of new generating units that can burn a blend of natural gas and green hydrogen, with a goal of increasing the hydrogen share by 2045 as technology improves, according to Dubbed IPP Renewed.
From coal stacks to hydrogen caverns
The shift from coal to gas and hydrogen is not just a fuel swap, it is a physical reinvention of the landscape around Delta. The coal fired units at IPP are no longer operating, and Before ceasing operations, the coal units had been working at low capacities for several years because the agency’s users had not been taking as much power, with the original contracts scheduled to expire in 2027, as reported in Before. In their place, new turbines are rising that Matt Kolste and John Ward have walked through on tours of the natural gas portion, a symbol that Though the regulations are tough, innovation prevails at the site, according to Though the project’s backers.
Below ground, the transformation is even more dramatic. Green Hydrogen Project Underway is how Utah officials describe the effort, Called the world’s “largest green energy storage project,” the Intermountain Power Agency, or IPA, is developing a system that could cut carbon emissions from the plant by more than 75 percent. The Advanced Clean Energy Storage hub, Located in Delta, Utah, will use salt caverns as a massive underground battery, part of a Power to Power concept that the Department of Energy has backed with a conditional loan guarantee for Advanced Clean Energy Storage I, the first phase of a facility designed to serve state clean energy goals and the industrial sector, as detailed in Advanced Clean Energy.
California demand, Utah pride and a global showcase
California’s hunger for clean power is the demand signal that makes all of this possible. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has set a goal of 100 percent renewable energy, and it is counting on the retooled Intermountain plant, described by The Intermountain Power Project as a key part of Los Angeles plans to reach carbon free energy by 2035, to help get there, according to Intermountain Power Project. Inside the Intermountain Power Plant on Sept. 16, 2025, in Delta, Utah, visitors could already see the outlines of that future, with One of the most consequential moments in California’s energy transition unfolding not in Los Angeles but in a rural Utah control room, as described in Inside the Intermountain.
Utah leaders, for their part, have leaned into the idea that their state is not just a passive host but an emerging energy powerhouse. Utah is not just powering homes, we are driving the next industrial revolution, one state Senate message declared, adding that What we build here secures our grid and strengthens communities as Utah turns into a global energy hub, as captured in a post from Utah. That rhetoric reflects a real shift: where earlier coverage framed the Intermountain plant as a coal facility that burned at almost full capacity and sparked fights in the Legislature, as seen in reporting that are focusing on the Intermountain power plant in Delta Utah State, the new narrative casts Delta as a test bed for technologies that countries from Europe to Asia are watching closely.
A tiny town at the center of the clean‑energy map
On a map, Delta barely registers, a small dot in central Utah that most drivers pass on their way to somewhere else. Yet a quick look at Delta, Utah shows a community now ringed by transmission lines, pipelines and the infrastructure of a regional grid. Located in Delta, Utah, the Advanced Clean Energy Storage hub is marketed as a large renewable energy storage facility that will take excess wind and solar, Convert GREEN HYDROGEN and store it in salt caverns, according to the site that highlights RENEWABLE ENERGY STORAGE. The project is part of an audacious plan to create hydrogen, which produces no carbon dioxide when burned, and store it in caverns so it can later power everything from flashlights to cars, as described in a feature that noted the scale of the underground battery coming to a tiny Utah town, according to Jan.
More from Morning Overview