[Sustain] ISO Fudges For Another Year On Closing Mirant Plant

[Eric Brooks]

Hi all,

Here is the update on the Mirant power plant that I just got published
in Fog City Journal.

http://www.fogcityjournal.com/wordpress/2009/09/14/power-plant-shell-game-san-franciscans-breathe-bad-air-for-another-year-for-electricity-that-isn%E2%80%99t-needed/

Power Plant Shell Game:
San Franciscans Will Breathe Bad Air For Another Year,
For Electricity That Isn’t Needed

By Eric Brooks, guest editorial

September 14, 2009

For a couple of years now, the California Independent System Operator
(ISO) has been telling San Francisco that it needs 150 megawatts of
immediately dispatchable electricity available to provide security from
blackout emergencies for its local power customers.

But last Friday, September 11, even though San Francisco’s energy
demands have not increased, the ISO suddenly reversed itself and said
the City now needs to keep a whopping 362 megawatts online for as long
as one more full year to satisfy reliability. 206 of these megawatts
will come from a dinosaur natural gas boiler at the Mirant power plant
in Potrero Hill that is so old and obsolete it cannot be turned off, and
must run 24/7 kicking massive amounts of air pollution into Potrero and
nearby Bayview, and devastating our bay habitat with heat and toxic
dispersions because of its antiquated ‘once-through cooling’ system.

Environmental justice organizers looking on while ISO made this
completely unjustifiable decision were not particularly surprised. The
ISO has pulled this kind of nonsense before, and all four of its Board
of Governors members are former or current fossil fuel energy
corporation executives who have spent their tenure bending over
backwards to tell California communities they need to keep burning
fossil fuel for electricity.

Just a couple of years ago, ISO pulled a similar bait-and-switch on San
Francisco. At the time, the City was hotly debating whether or not to
replace the Mirant gas boiler and three diesel peaker generators at the
same site, with a newer, but still polluting, natural gas power plant to
be installed in the Bayview Hunters Point. The new plant could generate
about 150 megawatts of power, roughly the same as the existing Mirant
diesel peakers which can generate 156 megawatts.

At that time, the City was also considering whether or not to approve
the Transbay Cable; a power line now being installed from the Northeast
that will deliver 400 megawatts of new electricity capacity by Spring of
2010. During the discussion of the cable approval, the ISO initially
said that the cable’s 400 megawatts would be enough to replace the 362
megawatts of capacity at the Mirant site, therefore eliminating the need
to build a new power plant in the Bayview. But just as the hearings on
the cable approval drew to a close, and organizers got ready to
celebrate the fact that they could shut down the decrepit plant in
Potrero without building another plant, the ISO suddenly, and with no
logical explanation, gave new testimony that, even when the Transbay
Cable was installed, Mirant would still have to stay online
indefinitely, or a new fossil fuel plant which could provide at least
150 megawatts of capacity, must be built to replace it.

Organizers and City officials decried this obvious shell game maneuver
meant to keep fossil fuel profits churning, refused to accept this
absurd new edict from the ISO, and eventually told the ISO that San
Francisco would neither build a new plant nor keep the old one running.

Under this pressure, and because other California cities have recently
been refusing its orders to build new fossil fuel plants, the ISO backed
down and finally admitted that once the Transbay Cable comes online and
some electricity grid upgrades are completed in November 2010, San
Francisco will in fact need no more than 25 megawatts (and possibly no
megawatts at all) of electricity capacity to replace and shut down the
entire Mirant plant. San Francisco’s utility commission (SFPUC) soon
announced that the City can easily make up that 25 megawatt need and
said that Mirant can fully close by the end of 2010. With this knowledge
in hand, the City Attorney’s office recently negotiated a deal with
Mirant to assure an end of 2010 closure date.

What this means in immediate terms is that, at absolute most, until the
transmission cable upgrades are done, the three emergency diesel
generators at Mirant must be kept available to switch on in case there
is both a once-in-ten-year unexpectedly high power drain on our
electricity system and two of the six major power lines feeding the City
go down at the same time (a scenario which has never occurred in history
and probably never will).

So once again, organizers and City leaders celebrated the news that
since only 150 megawatts of emergency back-up is now needed, the most
polluting unit at Mirant, the 206 megawatt gas boiler, should clearly be
shut down immediately.

Yet when the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and community
organizers went to last Friday’s Folsom, California hearing on the
Mirant plant, and said just that, the ISO staff suddenly pronounced
without any justification whatsoever that the gas boiler might also need
to be kept online until the end of 2010. The ISO Board of Governors
swiftly rubber stamped this staff recommendation as policy without
asking the obvious question of why San Francisco suddenly needs the
boiler’s extra 206 megawatts of capacity, when it has already been well
established that San Francisco only needs 150 megawatts of back-up.

And since public comment had already taken place on the item, no
onlookers were able to get up and ask this obvious question ourselves (a
situation which starkly points up the crucial need for the California
public to be given mandatory rebuttal time on all items at public hearings).

The battle over the gas boiler is not over. On Wednesday, September 16,
the State Water Resources Control Board is holding a hearing on whether
to end permits for 19 California plants that employ archaic
‘once-through cooling’, and City representatives will be there to ask
that the permit on the Mirant boiler be denied so it can be shut down
immediately.

Eric Brooks is Sustainability Chair of the San Francisco Green Party.

-- 
"I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate
themselves." – Che Guevara