Volts subscribers understand that a decarbonized energy system will require lots and lots of hydrogen, to store energy and to serve as a fuel in applications that are otherwise difficult to decarbonize. They also understand that while 95 percent of the world's hydrogen is currently produced using fossil fuels, there is a carbon-free way to produce hydrogen.It involves running electrical current through an electrolyzer, which splits hydrogen out of water. (Volts listeners heard all about electrolyzers a few episodes ago.) But the resulting hydrogen is clean only if the electricity that is run through the electrolyzer is clean. That's the recipe for clean hydrogen: clean electricity plus electrolyzers.Democrats also understand the need for clean hydrogen to scale up quickly, and they included tax credits for clean hydrogen production in the Inflation Reduction Act. And therein lies the rub. The IRS is currently in the process of determining exactly how those tax credits will be structured and to whom they will be available. At issue is a question that sounds simple but turns out to be devilishly complex: what exactly counts as clean hydrogen? More specifically, what exactly counts as clean electricity?The details matter enormously — up to $100 billion worth of subsidies are on the line. Big companies from BP to NextEra are lining up to try to make the standards as lax as possible, to maximize their short-term profits. But lax standards could perversely end up increasing greenhouse gas emissions, as electrolyzers come online, gobble up the available clean energy, and push grid managers to start up fossil fuel plants. (For more, read Canary Media’s deep-dive series on the hydrogen tax-credit battle.)To get to the bottom of all this, I’m excited to talk with Rachel Fakhry, who runs the hydrogen and energy innovation portfolio at the Natural Resources Defense Council, about the technical details of this fight, the ability of the industry to meet higher standards, and the enormous stakes involved, for the industry and the larger project of decarbonization, in getting it right. Get full access to Volts at www.volts.wtf/subscribe