Redondo Beach gas plant epitomizes California’s energy problems.
While relying on Redondo Beach power station, officials kick the can down the road politically
When the California Public Utilities Commission recommended 17 months ago that a gas-fired power plant on the Redondo Beach waterfront remain open beyond 2020 — over the objections of local officials and clean energy activists — Commissioner Martha Guzman Aceves made a commitment to the city’s mayor.
“I pledge to you, Mayor Brand, that I will never support a further extension,” she said.
Now it looks like that promise will be put to the test.
The State Water Resources Control Board is again being asked to extend the gas plant’s operating life, this time past the end of this year. Officials say the climate-polluting facility may be needed in summer 2022 — especially if there’s another punishing heat wave such as the one that resulted in brief rolling blackouts in August.
The fight over Redondo Beach Generating Station is a microcosm of the clean energy challenges confronting California and the nation.
The story begins in 2010, when the state water board voted to phase out the use of ocean water for cooling machinery at 19 power plants along the coast. As The Times reported back then, each day the intake pipes at those facilities “suck in enough seawater to fill Lake Arrowhead, then spit it out again, a little warmer and a lot deader,” killing fish that can get trapped against intake screens and larvae that are small enough to make it through the screens.
The owners of most of the power plants have since complied — by shutting down the offending generators, replacing them with fancy new units that don’t use ocean water for cooling or otherwise dramatically reducing harm to marine life.
Redondo Beach Generating Station was one of several gas plants that was supposed to ditch “once through cooling” by Dec. 31, 2020. Plenty of time to install fish-friendly technology or figure out how to replace all that energy generation, right?
That’s not how it worked out.
The plant’s owner, AES Corp., spent the next decade fighting with residents who wanted to see the facility replaced with a public park. A coalition that included Bill Brand, who was eventually elected Redondo Beach mayor, defeated several AES redevelopment plans, as well as an effort to rebuild the gas plant with air-cooling technology.
Then in 2019, the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Independent System Operator began warning that the state could face power shortfalls in summer 2021. They asked the state water board to please extend the shutdown deadline for Redondo Beach and three other Southern California gas plants.
Disaster struck sooner than expected. Or if not disaster, then at least hardship.
The state suffered its hottest August on record last year, with Death Valley hitting 130 degrees during a midmonth heat wave. The entire American West baked, limiting California’s ability to import electricity from its neighbors. The Independent System Operator ordered blackouts on two consecutive evenings, putting as many as half a million homes and businesses out of power for as long as 2½ hours.
To no one’s surprise, two weeks later the state water board voted to let the four Southern California gas plants stay open past Dec. 31, 2020. Three of the four were given three-year extensions; Redondo Beach’s reprieve was limited to one year, in a concession to Brand and other local officials who opposed any kind of leeway.
Today, state officials are mostly focused on lining up new energy resources for this summer. But they’re also looking ahead to next year. And last month, the Statewide Advisory Committee on Cooling Water Intake Structures — the acronym is SACCWIS, for those of you keeping score at home — voted to recommend that the Redondo Beach gas plant be given another new lease on life, with the shutdown deadline delayed until the end of 2023. Brand is not happy. “If the state of California is going to rely on one 70year-old power plant to secure their energy needs, we’ve got big problems,” he said. “There’s no question this was a failure in planning and a failure in grid management.”
Whether or not state officials should have been prepared, California is in this situation because of the rapidly changing nature of the power grid.
It used to be that as long as utility companies had enough electricity lined up to serve customers on the hottest summer afternoons, they’d be fine the rest of the year.
But solar power has changed the equation. Now it’s the evening hours — when the sun goes down yet temperatures can remain high — that are increasingly dicey. That was the problem period in summer 2020.
Utilities are adding thousands of megawatts of lithium-ion batteries, which are useful for banking solar energy generated during the middle of the day and saving it for the evening. But the batteries revolution is a work in progress.
For now, gas plants do the bulk of the work keeping the lights on after sundown. Hence the recent vote by SACCWIS.
“One of the toughest parts of this job is we have to make really, really difficult decisions that are painful,” said David Hochschild, chair of the California Energy Commission, when asked about Redondo Beach. “We are going down a road where we have to keep that facility open longer than we like. However, it will not be operating much.”
The Energy Commission and other agencies conducted a “stack analysis” of summer 2022 energy supplies, concluding California could once again find itself short of power, specifically in July and September, without Redondo Beach. If the plant were to stay open, they found, the shortfall would mostly vanish.
State officials described the projected shortfall as “conservative,” saying it could actually be worse if utilities don’t get batteries and other new power supplies online as fast as they’re supposed to — or if importing electricity from other Western states gets harder, which seems likely. Yet another coal plant, this one in Montana, closed last week.
At the same time, it’s clear that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration is being extra cautious after last year’s blackouts, which the governor does not want to repeat, especially with a likely recall vote looming. A Redondo Beach extension is one of many strategies his appointees are pursuing, including building batteries, paying people to use less electricity, adding capacity at existing gas plants and technical market fixes.
“The imperative right now, given the events of last August, is to be absolutely certain we can provide electric reliability,” Hochschild said. “When you have a threat to reliability like we did last August — even if it’s only four hours over two days — that becomes a very significant event. We cannot have people lose confidence in the reliability of the electric grid.”
And therein lies a key challenge of transitioning California’s economy away from fossil fuels.
Closing the Redondo Beach gas plant too quickly could result in hundreds of thousands of people finding themselves without air conditioning on a hot summer night. But not closing it only puts off the day when bold steps will be needed to wean the state off fossil gas — and the longer officials wait, the more the planet warms.
This one gas plant will not make or break California’s climate goals, or the electric grid. But it’s a useful case study because the choice is so stark. Shut the plant on deadline, or let it keep running. There’s no middle ground.
These types of decisions affect real communities in tangible ways.
More than 20,000 people live within a mile of Redondo Beach Generating Station and breathe the nitrogen oxides and fine particulates it emits. Redondo and neighboring Hermosa Beach are suing the state water board, arguing the agency failed to properly analyze the environmental impacts of last year’s gas plant extensions, a claim agency officials have rejected.
Mark Miller, AES Corp.’s market business leader for California, said in a written statement that the firm is “committed to support the responsible transition to a carbon-free energy future.” He suggested two more years of operation in Redondo Beach “can help achieve this goal” by reducing the risk of blackouts during extreme heat.
But there’s a final twist to this story: It turns out one of the three gas units at Redondo was completely unavailable during both days of rolling outages in August, because of what state officials describe as “plant trouble.” The other two units were generating slightly less electricity than usual — in one case, ironically, because of the extreme heat.
On the power grid, nothing is easy.
‘If the state of California is going to rely on one 70-year-old power plant to secure their energy needs, we’ve got big problems.’
— BILL BRAND,
This article was originally published in Boiling Point, a weekly email newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. Go to latimes.com/ boilingpoint to sign up.