potrero view

May 2009

Publisher’s View: Dead Plant Walking

By Steven J. Moss

Almost a decade ago the Potrero Power Plant Citizen’s Task Force – which now consists of Joe Boss, Philip De Andrade, Dick Millet, Karen Pierce, and me – was created by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to examine Mirant Corporation’s proposal to construct a 540 megawatt (MW) generating station to replace the Potrero Power Plant, San Francisco’s largest single pollution source.  Had the state approved the proposal, the bulked-up facility would have operated for at least a third of a century.  Mirant pitched the plant, in part, as a way to replace the Hunters Point Power Plant, which was ultimately shuttered three years ago in exchange for the development of Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s multi-million dollar Jefferson-Martin transmission line.

The community’s effort to head-off the proposed plant expansion led to the realization that the existing facility should be closed.  The 362 MW Potrero Power Plant has been spewing particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, NOx, and sulfur dioxides into Southeast San Francisco for 44 years, contributing to the highest number of asthma hospitalizations in the City, according to the San Francisco Department of Public Health.  The plant consists of unit three – which runs on natural gas and can produce 206 MW – and three diesel peakers, - four, five, and six – each of which can generate 52 MW.  The diesels are responsible for 60 percent of the plant’s emissions, but run only three percent of the time.  What’s more, the plant’s once-through cooling system sucks in bay water and dumps it back out at high temperatures, killing millions of larval fish, and stirring up cancer-causing PCBs and mercury lodged in the sediment.

The quest to close the Potrero Power Plant became a slower and less fun version of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.  The San Francisco Public Utility Commission (SFPUC) spent much of the last decade and millions of dollars trying to place 150 MW of publicly-owned generation in Dogpatch, only to have the Mayor scrap that plan in favor of retrofitting the existing diesel units, an idea that was quickly rejected by the Board of Supervisors.  In the meantime, Babcock and Brown convinced the state, in the form of the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), that the best way to secure San Francisco’s energy future is with the 400 MW, half-billion dollar Trans Bay Cable from the City of Pittsburg.  More tussling occurred, until last year Cal-ISO acknowledged that with the TBC unit three would no longer be needed.  Victory, or at least solid progress, seemed to be at hand.

Unfortunately, Cal-ISO is as eager to kill an existing power plant as General Motors has been to stop selling Hummers.  Although the quasi-governmental agency has agreed to close the facility’s largest unit, it’s in no hurry to do so.  While TBC will be operational by the first quarter of 2010, Cal-ISO is posturing that it will continue to spend millions of dollars of ratepayer money to indefinitely subsidize unit three’s operations.  And it flat-out refuses to shutter four, five, and six.

Yet according to Cal-ISO’s own data, with TBC, the City faces less than a 25 MW electricity supply gap.  And that gap only emerges under catastrophic conditions in which the largest supply lines, including TBC, are knocked-out.  The chance of that happening is not much more than finding a dinosaur bone in your back yard, and considerably less than the two percent likelihood that San Francisco will experience a big earthquake in a given year.

There’s also multiple real ways of closing the imaginary gap.  Upwards of 30 MW of emergency back-up engines – all of them cleaner-running than four, five, and six – are littered around Dogpatch, Mission Bay, and Potrero Hill, just waiting to play their part if San Francisco General Hospital, the University of California, San Francisco, or a local internet server farm needs sudden power.  A 2004 study by San Francisco Community Power demonstrated that Bay Area residents, particularly Potrero Hill families, would willingly reduce their electricity use if it would help close power plants.  And, particularly with the federal economic stimulus monies, there’s likely to be a rapid increase in local adoption of energy management measures and small-scale renewables.  

The Potrero Power Plant squats on 27 acres of bay shore property that should be developed as a lively new node of open space, recreational, and economic activities.  It’s time for it to close.  Please act on the advertisement that appears later in this issue, and let Cal-ISO know that it should let the plant die.  The resulting infinitesimal risk of outages would be far, far lower than the very real danger our community and our planet face from the facilities’ ongoing pollution of our air and water.

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