CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2013, OR THEREAFTER
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2013, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“SAN ONOFRE NO CAUSE FOR A POWER PANIC”
Temperatures reached 116 degrees in
some urban parts of California early this month, but there were no rolling
blackouts, no brownouts, no problems.
That happened with the San Onofre
Nuclear Power Station producing not even one watt of electricity. For the
second straight summer, the now-retired 2,250-megawatt facility is closed,
and it apparently will never reopen after leaky steam generators spewed small
amounts of radioactivity into the air near the Orange-San Diego county line
early last year.
How could a state where brownouts were
common just a dozen years ago lose enough electricity to power almost half a
million homes and not even hiccup?
It’s a combination of conservation and
a prudent building program. More than a decade of encouraging purchases of
energy efficient appliances also has had an impact. So have the solar panels
installed on many homes and businesses. But the main replacements for San
Onofre are “peaker” power plants that fire up mainly when demands on the grid
get high. Thousands more megawatts from them are available today than 12
years ago, mostly fueled by natural gas.
Because of the peakers coming on line
this summer, there should be no need to bring power down from the
Northwest, as could be done in an emergency. No need to impose brownouts on
some areas to prevent blackouts in others.
By the end of this summer,
five plants will come online in the City of Industry, Walnut Creek, El
Segundo, Anaheim and near Palm Desert. Together, their capacity is 2,600
megawatts, more than San Onofre’s maximum output, once the largest of any
generating station in California. None of those were available a year ago, when
San Onofre was also shut down and the state experienced no serious problems. So
the supply situation has improved.
It’s
true that peakers are not as “green” as renewable energy sources like solar and
don’t help meet the state’s demand for ever more “sustainable” power, but they
only run for relatively short periods.
Yes, the maximum demand at any one
moment will likely be about 2.3 percent higher this summer than last, according
to estimates from the Independent System Operator, which runs the state’s
electric grid. But ISO’s official summer load estimate, issued during the
spring, says “reserve margins under the normal peak demand scenario are…33.3
percent for the (statewide) system, 31 percent for Southern California.”
ISO regulations demand only a 15
percent reserve margin, which means that even in the region most directly
affected by the San Onofre outage, there is today double the reserve margin
needed to keep machines, commerce and households running.
Add to that several large solar
thermal power plants nearing completion in the state’s desert areas, and
there’s definitely no impending power shortage.
And yet, the state Public Utilities
Commission keeps pushing for more peaker plants that would cost consumers
billions of dollars.
Immediately after San Onofre’s
retirement was announced, the commission and the big utilities
sounded a most likely unjustified alarm. One recent PUC decision says the San
Diego area will need at least 298 megawatts more peak power by 2018, enough to
fuel about 60,000 homes. This revived an application to build a peaker of
about that size near the Mexican border, costing customers of San Diego Gas
& Electric Co. $80 million to $90 million per year over 20 years, almost $2
billion altogether.
No one says that power will be needed
for sure; it is, after all, just a peaker plant, reserve power by its very
definition. Should rooftop solar photovoltaic power capacity grow appreciably,
it wouldn’t even be needed four or five years from now.
And rooftop solar becomes more
viable every day. The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power just last
month authorized a 150 megawatt rooftop program at a cost of about $500
million, power that will produce no pollution. The program can be quadrupled
within the next two years, and there’s no reason something similar can’t be
done in San Diego, San Jose and many other places where the sun shines most
days.
The bottom line: Every piece of
objective information available says there’s no need to panic and build more
polluting conventional power plants, even if the PUC pushes it.
-30-
Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com
Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com
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