Jerry Brown was clear—no new refineries or power plants in California. No new dams or expansions of dams in California. He also wanted to stop the drilling of oil in California. So today we have normalized brownouts and blackouts, rationing of water, the highest gas prices in the nation—and power plants too old to work efficiently.
“”We have a lot of old clunkers that are supposed to be around when the situation gets critical, and they are breaking left and right,” said Gary Ackerman, former executive director of the Western Power Trading Forum.
That they are breaking down in June “is not a good sign,” he said, as hotter months loom ahead.
State officials are under tremendous pressure to avoid a repeat of last summer’s blackouts. If they strike again, the crisis could prove politically costly to Gov. Gavin Newsom ahead of a recall election this fall.
During the peak of the June heat wave, almost 11,000 megawatts of capacity — enough to power 8 million homes if running at full steam — was offline due to outages, according to data from California’s grid operator. Many of those outages affected natural gas power plants.
Brown and Newsom are getting their wish—the middle class are leaving. Major and minor businesses are leaving, taking their jobs with them. Replacing them are illegal aliens, which cost us tens of billions each year—with little to show for it. As the summer gets hotter, so will the Recall—each notice of rationed water, each firm announcing they are leaving the State, each brownout/blackout, each failed government school will remind voters it is time to Recall Gavin Newsom.
‘Old clunkers’: California power plants break down during heat wave
By COLBY BERME, Politico, 6/30/21
SACRAMENTO — Three decades-old power plants whose lives were extended to get California through another sweltering summer broke down during June’s western heat wave, raising new questions about the state’s reliance on the facilities to avoid rolling blackouts.
California made it through the broiling week without the power cuts it experienced last August. But the plants’ failures underscore a problem for the state amid a hot, dry summer that is also expected to compromise its hydropower production. Natural gas plants — particularly the oldest ones —are prone to falter in the heat.
“We have a lot of old clunkers that are supposed to be around when the situation gets critical, and they are breaking left and right,” said Gary Ackerman, former executive director of the Western Power Trading Forum.
That they are breaking down in June “is not a good sign,” he said, as hotter months loom ahead.
State officials are under tremendous pressure to avoid a repeat of last summer’s blackouts. If they strike again, the crisis could prove politically costly to Gov. Gavin Newsom ahead of a recall election this fall.
During the peak of the June heat wave, almost 11,000 megawatts of capacity — enough to power 8 million homes if running at full steam — was offline due to outages, according to data from California’s grid operator. Many of those outages affected natural gas power plants.
The state has to make up for such shortfalls by reducing large-scale energy usage and importing power from other states, among other measures. But with intensifying heat waves scorching all parts of the west, California can’t rely as much on its neighbors for extra power.
As the state geared up for the worst stretch of a heat wave on June 17 and 18, plants statewide were asked to defer maintenance-related downtime so that they could generate as much power as possible. But units at three of the four plants whose lives were extended last year were out throughout that week, an analysis of plant outage data from the California Independent System Operator shows.
Those failures come as the state prepares to consider a second such extension for a facility in Redondo Beach over the objections of environmentalists, state lawmakers and the city’s mayor. The “once-through” cooling technology used by the four plants fouls ocean water, harms marine life and violates California’s own environmental regulations. But state water officials agreed to delay enforcement of the water-use rules last fall after the Public Utilities Commission said it needed the plants to meet demand during peak hours.
Keep the facilities online for up to three more years, the PUC said, until 3,300 MW of clean electricity comes online to replace them — enough to power nearly 2.5 million homes.
Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance), who represents Redondo Beach, said the state can’t wait that long. “The energy demand for extreme heat caused by climate change should not be met by continuing to contribute to climate change with these unneeded natural gas power plants,” he said.
Muratsuchi tried to pass legislation last year to shut down all four of the old facilities. Now, he says, “all options are on the table.”
Two of the four plants also experienced outages last August, CAISO data shows — on the same days that power supply fell short of energy demand, triggering rolling blackouts for two nights, the first of their kind since the Enron-caused electricity crisis in the early 2000s.
“The state has put itself between a rock and a hard place by relying so much on these plants,” said Bill Powers, a mechanical engineer whoserves on the board of the Protect Our Communities Foundation, a San Diego-based clean energy and environmental advocacy group. “You don’t want that plant taking a final shot in the big ballgame.”
AES Corporation, a Virginia-based company that owns plants in Redondo Beach and Long Beach, confirmed its facilities’ mid-June outages — saying they were “adversely impacted” by high temperatures, boiler tube leaks and restricted cooling water inlet flows due to debris.
“AES has invested, and continues to invest, in preventative maintenance activities so that these plants are available when called upon by the CAISO to support system reliability needs,” Mark Miller, AES market business leader for California, said in a statement, adding that the plants still produced some power in June. The company’s Huntington Beach plant, which also uses once-through cooling, did not go down during the June heat wave.
The Houston-headquartered GenOn, which owns the Ormond Beach Generating Station in Oxnard, didn’t respond to requests for comment. Both of Ormond Beach’s units experienced unplanned outages on June 17. A day later, one Ormond Beach unit was still offline.
Preliminary federal data for 2020 show that the three plants generated 855,000 megawatt-hours of electricity from June through September, which their owners say shows they are still needed.
Until mid-June, CAISO made little information available about such outages, disclosing only self-reported company data from a point-in-time snapshot around 8:30 a.m., hours from evening peak demand. The daily reports didn’t list the cause of each outage, when it started or how long it lasted. Now the grid operator discloses more details, including the cause and duration of each outage and what time it occurred.
On June 17, the hottest day of the heat wave, more than half of the outages recorded at the three once-through cooling plants were caused by equipment failures or equipment in danger of imminent failure, the new data show. Some outages were reportedly for “plant maintenance,” despite the request from CAISO asking facilities to defer scheduled maintenance until after the heat wave.
State Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) said the outages undermine the justification for keeping the four plants alive. His district includes the Redondo Beach Generating Station, which had units down throughout the week of the June heat wave.
“This is becoming a pattern,” Allen said. “And from my perspective, it proves the city’s point that it’s not a necessary part of the region’s grid resiliency.”
The State Water Resources Control Board voted last September to extend the lives of the four aging plants by delaying enforcement of the state’s water-use rules. The facilities’ owners have said they would likely shut them down rather than undergo the costly process of converting them to comply with the regulations.
Now the Water Board is considering a proposal to extend, for the second time, the life of the Redondo Beach plant, which is slated for closure at the end of the year. Last fall, the Huntington Beach, Long Beach and Ormond Beach plants were allowed to operate through 2023, while the Redondo Beach facility got a one-year extension.
Water Board spokesperson Ailene Voisin said in a statement that its decision to take up the Redondo Beach proposal in October was recommended by the multi-agency Statewide Advisory Committee on Cooling Water Intake Structures. That committee said the plant is needed to help address uncertainty with 2023 power supply.
The Water Board deferred questions on the plants’ reliability to CAISO, which said those questions should be answered by the facilities’ owners.
Energy officials are working toward the goal of zero-emission electricity by 2045, but some of that technology can be costly and lacks the scale necessary to replace fossil fuel power in the near-term. The PUC took a step in that direction in late June, with the eventual closures of the once-through cooling plants in mind. It ordered utilities to buy 11,500 MW of clean energy from 2023 through 2026.
Allen — who has pushed for microgrids, energy storage and other decentralized solutions to replace fossil fuels — said it’s frustrating that the old plants are still around. “This is old-school technology that’s really damaging to local flora and fauna,” he said. “Shining a light on this data is really good, and showing that [outages] aren’t just a one-off.”
