Another peaker analysisSteven Moss, of SF Community Power, an organization that does energy efficiency work with small businesses, sent us an analysis showing we don’t need the peaker power plants.
Check it out. (It’s an Excel file.)
“This is all publicly available data,” Moss told us. “And all the data is right there. People can mess with it any way they want,” he added, encouraging number crunchers to dig into the spreadsheet.
For example, the tab titled “DC Line 72 Trans” was generated “based on Cal-ISO’s claim that 28 percent of transmission is not available,” said Moss. According to their analysis, with the Transbay Cable online, we’d still have a 100-megawatt cushion of extra power.
Moss said the data was collated and crunched by James Fine, an economist for the Environmental Defense Fund, and Richard McCann, of M.Cubed, who doesn’t seem like a slouch either.
Fine told me they did the analysis about a year ago and it came from questioning whether or not the city needed the 400 megawatt Transbay Cable. They assumed we’d have the peakers and factored them in. Now we’re getting the cable but questioning if we need the peakers, so the data’s the same but the question is different. Moss presented this data to the Mayor's office last week. Mayor Newsom's support for the peakers seems to have waned a bit recently.
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Comments (1)
Peaker Project Also Has Deep Economic/Environmental Flaw
With the May 5 hearing testimony on the new peaker proposal by the San Francisco Utilities Commission (SFPUC) staff, it has become clear that the plan has a deep flaw in it, and if allowed to proceed, the SFPUC is going to get the City mired in a disastrous economic and environmental boondoggle.
The plan totally fails to account for the fact that over the next ten years, the California energy landscape will so profoundly change due to new global warming regulations and spiking natural gas prices that the entire project will become financially impossible to maintain as written, and the inevitable result will be that the proposed plant will be allowed to run at maximum, leaving severe environmental and economic damage in its wake. Here's the problem:
The SFPUC revealed that peakers must run at leas 18 years in order to pay themselves off and will be contractually allowed as much as 30 years of operation if necessary to pay off those costs.
The critical flaw in this model is that in 2016, after the Department of Water Resources is no longer required to purchase electricity capacity from the peakers, the City and County of San Francisco will be fully on the hook for the remaining $110 million cost of the project with no guarantees of power purchasers. PG&E, the biggest such potential customer, has already said no, largely due to a new state mandate for it to cut its production of new fossil fuel projects. Other potential customers will face the same environmental restrictions over the next two decades and will likely be unable to purchase our peaker capacity.
This building environmental restriction on fossil fuel energy purchases will then combine like gasoline to a spark with the reality that natural gas production is about to peak (within the next decade) just as oil is peaking and skyrocketing in price now. This means that our ability to sell natural gas power capacity at a reasonable price will likely collapse, (driving potential gas energy customers even further away) and we will be forced to run the peakers full tilt it, in what might be a vain attempt, to sell enough hard power to meet even the 30 year contract deadline, and we will -likely- still not regain costs and will have to -amend- the contract to run the peakers well -past- 2040 and/or at higher than the 4000 hour per year limit to regain those costs.
This -guarantees- that the peakers will pollute -far- more than the existing Mirant plant which will certainly close within the next decade. This is because Mirant is no longer locked into -any- operation to regain costs and just 4 years from now we will have built hundreds of megawatts of renewables, efficiency and capacity under the Community Choice renewable energy project, and also under new State and San Francisco climate change requirements; and also because the then completed Transbay Cable project will bring us -another- 400 megawatts of capacity (enough to meet almost half of San Francisco's daily electricity needs).
The alarming boondoggle scenario described above makes the peaker plants a -probable- economic and environmental disaster. It would be insanity to put ourselves in this massively risky future scenario just to avoid a few years of air and water pollution from Mirant; pollution that can be much more effectively avoided by canceling the peaker project and then devoting our full time and energy on closing down Mirant as soon as possible by replacing it with renewables, efficiency and the Transbay Cable; and by redirecting the activist energies currently being wasted on the necessity of blocking the peaker project, into a full on high powered environmental and social justice campaign to demand the immediate closure of Mirant.
Eric Brooks
San Francisco Green Party
Posted by Eric Brooks | May 8, 2008 11:51 AM