What Does a Green Hydrogen Mandate Cost? Evidence from the Intermountain Power Project
Description
This dataset accompanies "What Does a Green Hydrogen Mandate Cost? Evidence from the Intermountain Power Project," submitted to the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy. It contains the complete replication materials for a techno-economic analysis of the cost of a renewable-only hydrogen mandate at the Intermountain Power Project (IPP), a repowered 840 MW combined-cycle plant in Delta, Utah contracted to fire a 30 percent hydrogen blend produced solely from renewable energy and stored in two salt-dome caverns. The dataset includes hourly time series (17,544 hours, April 2023 to March 2025) of CAISO SP-15 day-ahead wholesale electricity prices, site-calibrated solar and wind capacity factors derived from Open-Meteo historical reanalysis and validated against NREL's National Solar Radiation Database and WIND Toolkit, and hourly grid carbon intensity derived from CAISO fuel-mix data. It also includes a parameter register documenting all cost assumptions (electrolyzer capital and operating cost, stack replacement schedule and turndown ratio, salt-cavern storage cost, battery storage cost, transmission spur-line cost, and discount rate) with sources drawn from the U.S. Department of Energy, NREL's Annual Technology Baseline, Lazard, and peer-reviewed literature. The code reproduces every figure and table in the manuscript, including the green-premium decomposition, the sensitivity analysis across technology-cost projections, the partial-mandate cost frontier, and the implied carbon-abatement cost calculation. The manuscript's robustness check additionally validates results against Open-Meteo, NREL NSRDB, NREL WIND Toolkit, and renewables.ninja; the renewables.ninja-derived data is excluded from this deposit under its CC BY-NC license, but is fully reproducible using the included script (03_Code_Model/03_validate_external.py) with a free API token. Researchers, regulators, and industry analysts may use this dataset to independently verify the reported results, to recalibrate the cost model to other facilities or contract terms, or to extend the analysis to different mandate designs, resource qualities, or cost trajectories. All included raw data is drawn from publicly available sources (CAISO OASIS, Open-Meteo, NREL) under licenses permitting redistribution with attribution; see the accompanying README for full citation requirements.