April 7, 2004

ON MARCH 17 the city of San Francisco filed an application with the California Energy Commission on its proposed siting of three combustion turbine power plants (CTs) in southeast San Francisco. The proposed San Francisco Electric Reliability Project is designed to generate 145 megawatts of electricity at a site adjacent to the San Francisco Bay, on property originally slated for the expansion of Mirant Corp.'s existing power plant.

Jesse Blout, economic development director for the Mayor's Office, stated that the CTs would result in "a net reduction in air emissions and the closure of the Hunters Point power plant." Unfortunately, there's no guarantee of that: the city won't promise to keep the new generators idle if either Pacific Gas and Electric Co. or the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) refuse to authorize the closure of the Hunters Point plant. Ominously, PG&E has just applied to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District for a new five-year clean-air permit for the plant.

Right now CAISO insists the Hunters Point plant keep running because San Francisco needs to generate a certain amount of power within city limits. And it's hard to pin the agency down on what would be an adequate replacement.

An April 18, 2003, letter from CAISO president Terry Winter initially suggested four CTs and six upgrades in the transmission lines that bring in power from outside the city might replace the Hunters Point plant. More recently, CAISO officials have suggested that another major transmission project, the Jefferson-Martin 230-KV line, may also be required. As the industry shopping list grows, so too does the likelihood of another broken promise to the residents of San Francisco.

Does this all sound familiar? In 1998 then-mayor Willie Brown, meeting with residents of Bayview-Hunters Point, promised the plant would be closed down within three years. If you've driven through the Bayview recently, you can't fail to notice there's still smoke belching out of that plant.

Residents of Bayview-Hunters Point already suffer hospitalization rates three times the statewide average for asthma, cognitive heart failure, hypertension, and emphysema. Unless the Hunters Point plant closes, the city's CTs would add another 145 megawatts of fossil-fuel pollution in southeast San Francisco, an area already overburdened with two aging and dirty power plants, a sewage treatment plant that processes 86 percent of the city's waste, a superfund site, two major highways, and the bulk of industrially zoned land in San Francisco. The city proposes to locate the combustion turbines within 600 feet of residences – in an area that is plagued, especially in summer and fall, with weather-inversion patterns that trap pollution at ground level.

The city admits the proposed site for the CTs is located in an area that doesn't meet state and federal ozone air-quality standards or state fine particulate-matter standards. In spite of this, the city suggests the CTs "could be operated 24 hours per day, seven days per week for periods of time." Scary stuff, huh?

Public power carries with it a great responsibility to ensure a safe and reliable energy future for the city. Without a guarantee that PG&E's Hunters Point power plant will be closed immediately, CTs will add pollution to southeast San Francisco, not reduce it. Residents have the right to demand that San Francisco be part of the solution, not the problem.