The need to build the combustion turbine (CT) power plants has been hitched to two things. Cal-ISO, the state's grid manager, demands San Francisco have some form of firm, dispatchable energy generation on city ground. Currently that's provided by Mirant Portrero, an elderly 4-unit plant that burns natural gas and diesel and uses over 200 million gallons of bay water a day for cooling. It's long been charged that the plant spews too much pollution into the Bayview, an area of the city that sees enough environmental injustice. The city has been committed to closing it or a number of years and it's a signature issue for that district's supervisor, Sophie Maxwell. To date, Cal-ISO will only accept another power plant in its stead and the peakers -- four combustion turbines the city won in an energy crisis settlement -- are the plan.

"I am not supporting development of a power plant," Maxwell said, urging that building the peakers is about closing Mirant, which, after years of study, she believes is the only solution. "I've not focused on this for eight years because I oppose solar or renewable energy," she went on, outlining her detailed involvement with the issue and attempting to assure the crowd that this is the way forward for a cleaner neighborhood.

But Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, a recent renewable energy revivalist, railed on the city to forgo the peakers and adhere to the state's mandate for a deep reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The peakers would emit 308,629 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions a year. Mirant currently emits 396,325, so building the new plant would be a reduction, if modest. Cheers arose from the audience when she said, "I understand what's going on over there even though I've not lived it myself." She said the city could potentially run the plants for 30 years to recoup the $250 million pricetag to build them. "My son will be almost 40 years old when these things are shut."

Three of the six proposals before the committee were put up by her -- calling for the city to adopt the state's energy action plan, an independent analysis of the need for the peakers, and a fiscal feasibility study of the plan. Behind the scenes, critics claim she's just delaying approval of the plan and carrying water for PG&E, which opposes the peakers.

Under the guise of the CloseIt Coalition, PG&E has been sending mailers to citizens, filled with threatening language and scary smokestack images. "These new plants would reverse decades of environmental stewardship," a recent PG&E mailer states, going on to suggest a "greener alternative." Their alternative: a study, done by PG&E, outlining transmission upgrades and energy efficiencies that could be done on their lines.

Outside of the hearing, PUC staffer, Laura Spanjan, pointed out PG&E should upgrade their lines anyway.

Ed Harrington, the newly anointed general manager of the PUC, had a PG&E mailer on hand when he said, "I'm disturbed by the number of people using various pieces of information that are being called facts." He went on to dispel them by saying the peakers would be cleaner than Mirant, that it was clear to PUC staff that putting together an energy plan that didn't include the peakers "would have been a waste of time," and that alternate studies showing the city doesn't need the peakers have only been done by PG&E. "The only study I'm aware of was PG&E's, in July of 2007." He added It was six pages long, "lightweight by Cal-ISO's standards," and they rejected it. (It's actually seven, and you can read it here.)

Considering PG&E's stance against the peakers, which they likely consider a threat to their monopoly on San Francisco's energy market, it seems if a real alternative were possible they would have worked harder to come up with it, rather than just launching a PR campaign against the peakers. PG&E -- which claims opposition to the peakers for environmental reasons -- is actually building similar power plants throughout the state, is a vendor of natural gas, and takes a proud stance supporting it as a clean fossil fuel. They're also building a 230-mile natural gas pipeline between Oregon and California in anticipation of a spike in need for LNG.

Sup. Aaron Peskin, chair of the committee, brought forth a number of experts to dispel or support conflicting information that's been going around about the peakers, including reps from the PUC (their round-up on the issue is here), the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the California Energy Commission, Sierra Research (which did an independent analysis of the peakers' air quality impacts), citizens from the Power Plant Task Force that have been working on the issue for as many as ten years, and a former Cal-ISO board member from 1997-2005, Mike Florio, who talked about how the state comes up with this stuff in the first place. He confirmed that it came from the community wanting to close Mirant and it took a push from the ISO board to its staff to come up with data on what it would take to close a power plant in San Francisco. "That's contrary to their DNA to shut down power plants. They want more power plants. They want more energy," he said. In fact, that's the solution ISO staff came up with -- build another, cleaner power plant. "I'm not saying I'm happy with this," he added, but pointed out, "They [the city] don't have to run. It's just that they sit there, capable of running." He considered the city-ownership an advantage because we can call the shots about when they're on or off. He also said that ISO is currently grappling with the issue of a grid with more renewables and that peakers are considered a good augmentation to a renewable portfolio. "That's why they are encouraging more of these peakers -- to run quickly when needed."

Eric Brooks, a Green Party member from Our City, disagrees. "They're telling us we need to build fossil fuel plants in order to support renewable energy," he said. "If you create backup power you're going to rely on it...If we create any fossil fuel energy that just gives us a chance to slack." He's been pushing the PUC to put the city's Community Choice Aggregation plan in front of Cal-ISO instead of the peakers. The CCA plan adopts 51 percent renewables and efficiency measures by 2017.

According to testimony from the air district and Sierra Research, the peakers are about 33 percent cleaner than Mirant and are more efficient as they can be turned on and off instantly, whereas the older turbines at Mirant require hours to get up to speed and essentially idle, even when they're just on-call. "If you want them to run tomorrow afternoon, you need to turn them on tonight," said Gary Rubenstein of Sierra Research. "As a result you end up with a lot more pollution from Potrero Unit 3 than you need." (For a breakdown on the pollution, check out page 22 of this PDF.) He singled out that one unit of Mirant's four because there had been some discussion of closing Units 4,5,6 -- which run on diesel and are far dirtier -- and retrofitting Unit 3, which runs on natural gas. Former ISO member Florio suggested this would be costly and compared it to a similar project recently completed in Long Beach, citing $250 million for the retrofit -- the same cost for the city to build the peakers.

PUC staff also testified that capacity payments from the state would finance the project, and the city would be paid for having the peakers available to run, whether they operate or not.

Public comment was about fifty-fifty, for and against, with some devoted Bayview residents like Espanola Jackson telling the committee the neighborhood never asked for this power plant. Others who've been involved with the process for as many as ten years, called out the newbies for arriving on the scene at this stage of the game. Tony Kelly of the Potrero Boosters, who support the peakers, pointed to Alioto-Pier specifically. "I don't know where you've been for the last five years. I've brought this up in front of you before and you never said a word."

The committee voted to send the peaker plan forward to the full Board, with Alioto-Pier dissenting. They also voted against her two measures, calling for an independent analysis and a fiscal feasibility study, with Peskin saying he felt they'd already been done "in spades." They did pass Alioto-Pier's resolution to adopt the state's energy action plan, though Peskin amended it significantly.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, just back from Brazil where he was speaking about green energy, flew in a day early to witness the hearing and gave a thorough grilling to the reps, with a pointed comment about how this conversation would be moot if the city's public power plan hadn't lost by a handful of votes in 2001. He still left the hearing unsatisfied. "There are two schools of thought here. Cal-ISO is giving us a very restricted view of what we can do. The other school of thought is we can do better with what's before us. I'm not convinced the city has done its due diligence." He compared the struggle to the recent aerial spraying issue. "The vigor demonstrated by many of us on the light brown apple moth demonstrates what we can do even when the state opposes us," he said.

Josh Arce, of Brightline Defense, which sued to stop the construction of the plants, said he and Steven Moss of SF Community Power had a meeting with the Mayor's office last Thursday to go over alternatives to the peakers, and that Newsom is now more neutral on the issue. In the past he's been one of the leaders, signing off on letters to Cal-ISO confirming the city's commitment to close Mirant and build the peakers. Giselle Barry, a rep from the mayor's office, said, "Number one, he's absolutely committed to shutting down the power plants and, number two, he's committed to investigating alternatives to the CT project and will work with all our community partners to determine what the alternatives are." She confirmed that his staff has been meeting with those community partners, listing the Sierra Club and PG&E as two of them, as well as commissioners from the PUC and people from the Department of the Environment and the Mayor's Office of Workforce and Economic Development, which brokered the ironclad deal with Mirant to close for good once their contract to run for reliability purposes is pulled by Cal-ISO.