November 2008

Publisher’s View Power Plants

By Steven J. Moss

Last month the Potrero Power Plant Task Force – aka, your neighbors – voted to oppose the Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposal to retrofit roughly half the Potrero Power Plant – Units Four, Five, and Six – as a way of closing the other half, Unit Three.  The retrofit proposal emerged from negotiations between the Mayor’s Office and the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), which insists that some amount of in-City generation be available to ensure electric grid reliability.  In the Mayor’s calculation, half a retrofitted Potrero Power Plant is less expensive and less environmentally harmful than developing a small City-owned generating station, a project the San Francisco Public Utility Commission had been pursuing for almost seven years.  

There’s no small irony in the state’s insistence that San Francisco, the densest City this side of Chicago, continue to host a sizeable generating facility.  The California Air Resources Board is about to adopt a host of policies – including requiring that one-third of the state’s power come from renewable generating resources, as well as of higher efficiency standards for buildings and appliances – that will reduce polluting air and greenhouse gas emissions.  Fossil fuels are yesterday’s way of feeding our energy appetite.

What’s more, San Francisco doesn’t need any part of the Potrero Power Plant, or new municipally-owned generation, to ensure reliability.  With the half-billion dollar, 400 megawatt (MW) Trans Bay Cable, the City will soon have access to ample electricity supplies.  In addition, solar is being steadily added to our roof tops; local businesses have offered upwards of 50 MW of load that can be curtailed when supplies are tight; and there’s an ongoing push for all of us to become more energy and water efficient.  And while City policymakers have been arguing about how to close the Potrero Power Plant, electric storage technology has made significant advances, and is now ready for prime time, both to support solar and wind installations during cloudy or windless days, and as a way to manage the overall grid.  Demand for electricity has declined in the face of our emerging economic downturn, and, with the right policies in place, could remain flat for more than a decade even with a resurrected economy.

Tens of millions of dollars have been dumped into the Potrero Power Plant, through various Cal-ISO contracts that ensure it remains running while keeping polluting air emissions from the antique plant as low as possible.  It’ll cost another more than $100 million to retrofit the plant.  One hundred million dollars would buy upwards of 100 MW of permanent energy reductions at San Francisco homes and businesses.  These funds could be invested in retiring decades old appliances, helping families and small businesses lower their electricity bills.  Or it could be spent on a 1960s-era power plant that, even after its retrofitted, everyone still wants to close.

Of course that’s not the way state energy policymaking works.  It’s easy to dump money into dirty old power plants, but these same funds can’t be directly shifted to greener alternatives.  Still, the City’s Electricity Resource Plan, which is supposed to guide our energy future, is almost a half-decade old.  It’s time we came up with another plan, one that points the way to an energy future in which we want to live in.        

 

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