California will keep four natural gas plants online for another few years instead of shutting them down, in an effort to guarantee the lights stay on as the state rapidly adds more renewable energy.
The decision, made unanimously Tuesday by members of the State Water Resources Control Board, comes just weeks after California grid operators imposed rolling blackouts on residents during peak electricity load amid a severe heat wave.
Republican politicians, including President Trump, were quick to blame the blackouts on California’s aggressive renewable energy and climate policies.
California energy officials have said renewable energy wasn’t the root cause of the blackouts. Nonetheless, the incident has sparked debate about California’s ability to ensure the power stays on as it shuts down gas and nuclear plants and replaces them with more wind and solar power.
“I’m a firm believer that we need to pay attention to the integrity of the grid. Because if we do not, we’re going to lose this whole green thing we’re doing,” said California Assembly Member Patrick O’Donnell, a Democrat who represents Los Angeles harbor and parts of Long Beach.
“When people go to turn on their light switch, they need to know that those lights will go on,” O’Donnell added in remarks during the board’s Tuesday public meeting. “If they don’t, they’re going to get suspicious. They’re going to turn on our efforts to go green.”
The four coastal natural gas plants at issue were slated to shut down at the end of this year under a 10-year-old state policy phasing out the use of ocean water to cool the facilities. That practice damages marine life and the environment.
The new deadlines approved by the water board would allow three of those plants — in Huntington Beach, Long Beach, and Oxnard — to run an additional three years. The fourth plant, in Redondo Beach, would run for one additional year.
The decision to prolong the gas plants’ lives wasn’t directly related to the recent blackouts. California energy officials and utility regulators requested last summer the water board consider the extensions amid concerns the state wouldn’t have enough electricity capacity to secure grid reliability in the next few years.
All commissioners on the state water board stressed they didn’t take lightly the decision to keep the plants online but said they deferred to state energy agencies on grid reliability concerns.
“The decision doesn’t come easy,” said E. Joaquin Esquivel, board chairman. “We do know that these have critical impacts on communities and call to balance really competing, strong, but critical needs.”
For those backing the extensions, the recent blackouts solidified their case. All of the gas plants in question were needed to help meet electricity demand during the recent outages, said Edward Randolph, the California Public Utilities Commission’s deputy executive director for energy and climate policy.
“All the agencies understand the impacts of climate change are happening quickly. There are many places we need to move fast and faster than we have been doing,” Randolph said. “A recommendation to extend the life of these plants was not something my commissioners or other commissioners took lightly.”
Randolph also raised concerns that the coronavirus pandemic could delay new resources from coming online, which could jeopardize electric reliability in the near term. The California Public Utilities Commission has directed power companies to bring online 3,300 extra megawatts in the next three years, including battery storage, to help balance the grid.
“Further outages or risk of unreliable electric resources will further erode national efforts to make the transition to greater and greater reliance on those renewable energy resources,” said Lisa Krueger, president of the U.S. strategic business unit of AES, which operates three of the natural gas plants.
Krueger pointed to a letter about the recent blackouts sent last month by California’s three energy agencies to Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. In that letter, she said, the agencies said they aren’t sure whether California would have enough extra power to ensure the lights don’t go out during periods of stress on the grid.
“If they’re not sure, why should we take away the safest and most reliable path?” she said. That is to keep all four gas plants “available as an insurance policy.”
Nonetheless, the extensions faced significant backlash from environmentalists and residents in the regions who want to see the plants shut down as promised 10 years ago.
Opponents also argued there is nothing stopping power companies from asking for additional extensions in the future.
The one-year extension for the Redondo Beach plant faced the fiercest opposition. Dozens of city officials, local residents, and grassroots groups described pollution and clouds of black smoke from the aging plant blanketing the densely packed coastal communities of Redondo Beach and Hermosa Beach.
There are more people living within a mile of that plant than all three other plants, Mayor Bill Brand of Redondo Beach told the board. He added the California Public Utilities Commission’s own calculations show the state would have enough extra resources if only the three other gas plants were kept online and Redondo was shut down as planned this year.
“If the answer is always yes, there will be extensions, they’ll always be motivated to always ask for more,” Brand said. “Fossil fuel power plants are not the future of energy production in California.”
