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.

FCJ Editor

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