GREEN CITY The push from city leaders to shut down Mirant's aging Potrero power plant advanced another step June 2 when the San Francisco supervisors approved an ordinance sponsored by Sophie Maxwell and Michela Alioto-Pier that urges closing the entire facility by the end of 2010 and directs the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to update a plan charting the city's energy future.
But the current city proposal for closing the Mirant plant appears to rely entirely on replacing that power with the output of other private fossil fuel plants — in someone else's backyard.
The city is following the same script as Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which wants to upgrade and expand the lines bringing its own private power into the city — instead of San Francisco generating power of its own.
In fact, Mayor Gavin Newsom has introduced legislation to sell four city-owned combustion turbines that are currently collecting dust in storage in Houston. Obtained as part of a 2003 lawsuit settlement, the turbines were almost employed last year to build four small city-owned power plants to fully replace the Mirant facility — but that plan was ultimately shot down.
The California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), a federally regulated body that oversees grid reliability, currently requires Mirant's dirty San Francisco facility to stay in service to provide in-city generation capacity in case of catastrophic power grid failure. But city officials now say a new underwater power cable from the East Bay could replace Mirant Unit 3, which spews fumes into the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood.
Last month, Newsom, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, City Attorney Dennis Herrera, SF Public Utilities Commission General Manager Ed Harrington and Sups. Sophie Maxwell and Michela Alioto-Pier sent a letter to Cal-ISO making the case that with the installation of the TransBay Cable — which would link the city with generating facilities in Pittsburg — and other planned system upgrades, the entire Mirant facility could be retired by next year.
Maxwell's ordinance references that letter, and urges PG&E to "develop expeditiously" its transmission-upgrade projects to pave the way for the plant's closure. Cal-ISO spokesman Gregg Fishman says that so far, it hasn't reviewed PG&E's plans.
Joe Boss, a longtime member of the city's power plant task force, says he has little confidence that Mirant can be shut down without being replaced with new in-city electricity generation. He told us he believes it's a bad move to sell off the publicly owned combustion turbines.
The TransBay Cable is essentially a 10-inch thick extension cord that would connect a PG&E substation in Pittsburg with another PG&E substation in Potrero Hill. It's being bankrolled by the Australian investment firm Babcock & Brown, which ran into serious financial trouble during the economic downturn, and its San Francisco branch was bought out last month. Currently under construction, the cable project is being built in tandem with the Pittsburg power company, a municipal utility that would retain ownership of the cable and converter stations. PG&E customers will ultimately pay for power transmitted over the line.
The way the theory goes, once the cable goes ...
Good article Rebecca. I would add one crucial point. San Francisco's Community Choice energy project (now named Clean Power SF) if begun on schedule by the end of this year, would likely place a 150 megawatt wind farm beside the eastern length of the Transbay Cable; and require the transfer of its clean energy over the line to San Francisco. This would ensure that we wouldn't be drawing fossil fuel power over that line.
The urgency however, is that San Francisco needs to announce its intentions to build that wind farm ASAP so we can get first transmission rights over the new cable for that renewable power.
This means we need to get a Clean Power SF request for proposals (RFP) adopting the strongest possible local renewable energy and efficiency standards approved by the end of the year, so that San Francisco won't need one kilowatt of fossil fuel energy from anywhere.
Eric Brooks
SF Green Party
Sustainability Working Group
Good article Rebecca. I would add one crucial point. San Francisco's Community Choice energy project (now named Clean Power SF) if begun on schedule by the end of this year, would likely place a 150 megawatt wind farm beside the eastern length of the Transbay Cable; and require the transfer of its clean energy over the line to San Francisco. This would ensure that we wouldn't be drawing fossil fuel power over that line.
The urgency however, is that San Francisco needs to announce its intentions to build that wind farm ASAP so we can get first transmission rights over the new cable for that renewable power.
This means we need to get a Clean Power SF request for proposals (RFP) adopting the strongest possible local renewable energy and efficiency standards approved by the end of the year, so that San Francisco won't need one kilowatt of fossil fuel energy from anywhere.
Eric Brooks
SF Green Party
Sustainability Working Group
First, Rebecca has it right: merely moving the same dirty type of energy source to another location does absolutely nothing to help the environment, and in this instance is in fact environmentally harmful (see "Second" below).
Second, transmitting electricity instead of producing it where it is used creates additional environmental harms, so better that the Potrero Hill plant remain open than for this awful scheme to go forward. Why are we causing more harm to the Bay and the life in it by laying a huge cable at the bottom? This is nothing but political grandstanding by SF politicians in order to impress their constituents, which seems to be what Sophie Maxwell excels at.
Finally, placing wind generators in Pittsburgh for energy consumed in San Francisco is not an environmentally helpful solution to anything. Wind generators for power used in SF should be placed at Ocean Beach and atop hills in SF, taking care not to harm or interfere with birds. Even more basic than that is that all buildings in SF -- and everywhere -- should have their roofs covered with solar collectors if their occupants want to use electricity. Doing those things and reducing consumption would alleviate any need for importing electricity, which would be the best environmental solution by far.
First, while I agree that it is much better to localize energy sources instead of piping in distant energy, even if it is renewable, my point was that the Transbay Cable (which I myself opposed but which we are now stuck with) will be used a lot less for fossil fuel energy if we build the planned wind farm next to it for electricity generation right away.
On your criticism of bird impacts, this is largely a myth cooked up by the fossil fuel industry to turn people off to critically needed wind power projects which will put them out of business. New designs and placement strategies for windmills have greatly reduced their impact on birds. And bear in mind that even the existing bird impacts of first generation windmills are minuscule compared to the much more serious impacts of fossil fuel pollution and global warming on the very same bird populations.
Finally, your contention that laying an electrical cable on the Bay floor will do more harm to the Bay than the existing Potrero power plant is simple absurd.
The Potrero plant has massive ongoing negative environmental impacts, the worst of which is the constant dumping of superheated water into the Bay which creates a zone of death; a zone which is made even more deadly by the water dumping's constant churning up of toxic mining and industrial generated chemicals from Bay floor sediments. And there are also historic coal tar residues from the Potrero plant site that are constantly poisoning the Bay and which cannot be properly cleaned up until the Potrero plant is shut down and removed.
What I'm getting at, is that if we get Clean Power SF (which also plans a massive build-out of local rooftop solar and efficiency projects) going right away, we can make transporting fossil fuel electricity over the Transbay Cable to San Francisco completely unnecessary.
Eric Brooks
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