How a Utah plant lights an LA room

A high-voltage direct current line does the carrying (a long distance power line that moves electricity as a steady one-way current instead of the alternating current in your walls, which cuts losses over long distances). It runs from the plant near Delta to a converter station at Adelanto in the Mojave, about 490 miles by the project's public descriptions, and from there into the LADWP system.

Because the tie lands at Adelanto and feeds LADWP directly, this power does not move through the California grid operator that serves most of the state. LADWP runs its own balancing area, its own slice of the grid. That is part of why the plant can feel invisible to LA residents: it sits off the CAISO map most people picture when they think of the California grid.

What IPP Renewed actually swapped in

Those coal units, on the order of 1,800 megawatts of capacity at last public report, came offline in 2025. In their place sits a smaller combined cycle gas plant (gas turbines whose waste heat raises steam to make extra power), roughly 800 megawatts in the public plans, engineered to burn a hydrogen blend starting around a 30 percent hydrogen mix by volume, with a stated goal of moving toward 100 percent over time.

Treat those percentages as goals, not guarantees. Burning hydrogen at scale in turbines, and producing and storing it nearby, is still being proven, and schedules on projects like this slip. The honest summary is short: the coal is gone, the gas is running, and the hydrogen part is a plan whose pace depends on cost, fuel supply, and equipment still being wrung out.

Who owns it, and what LA's share is

Ownership sits with the Intermountain Power Agency, a Utah public agency, not with LADWP. LADWP is the operating agent and by far the largest buyer of the plant's power, alongside a group of other Utah municipal utilities. So LA does not own the smokestack, but it has long been the plant's main customer and the reason the DC line points at the Mojave in the first place.

Your own share shows up indirectly, in LADWP's annual power content label and budget documents rather than on your monthly bill. If you want the number, those filings are where it lives, and it shifts year to year as the plant's output and LADWP's other resources change.

Worth watching this month

1. LADWP's next annual Power Content Label should show how large a slice the Intermountain plant still is, a routine disclosure but the clearest public number.

2. Utah Division of Air Quality permit records for the new gas and hydrogen units reveal what the plant is actually allowed to run, which matters more than any press description.

3. The Intermountain Power Agency project page tends to post IPP Renewed hydrogen milestones first, so any schedule slip usually surfaces there before anywhere else.

4. EIA plant-level data will show the facility's monthly fuel use shifting from coal to gas in the numbers, a slow but checkable signal.

5. LADWP board agendas are where any new contract or budget item tied to the Utah plant gets decided, so watch them when cost questions come up.