San Francisco’s proposal to install several combustion turbines, or “peaker” plants, in the southeast neighborhoods has created a firestorm of protest, particularly from environmentalists who don’t want the city building any new fossil-fuel plants.
I get that. I also know that PG&E has its dirty little fingers in the public-policy pie. And that makes it more complicated.
The lastest proposal, which comes out of the mayor’s office, calls for Mirant Corp. to retrofit its own peakers, clean them up, run them on natural gas, and put that power into the grid so the city doesn’t have to build its own plants. The argument is that Mirant’s peakers would be cleaner than the city’s, and might run less often.
I’ve always thought that leaving Mirant in control is a terrible idea. If we want to tell the state that we aren’t going to build any new fossil-fuel plants, then let’s stick to it, and rely entirely on renewables (at the possible risk of brownouts in high-use periods). But I don’t trust Mirant for a second — and I don’t think the mayor has any legal guarantee that Mirant will do what it says it will.
All that said, I got an interesting communication this weekend from Joe Boss, who’s a Potrero Hill activist. He and Tony Kelly are worried that the Mayor and Mirant will wind up creating the worst possible scenario: The big Mirant plant, with its smokestack and pollution, will continue to operate for the forseeable future.
It’s admittedly a bit of a speculative scenario, and a lot of things would have to go wrong for it to happen. (Among other things, Mirant, which loses its permit to use Bay water for cooling at the end of this year, would have to invest in a big new air-cooling system.) But it’s worth putting out there as the supervisors prepared to decide on the fate of the city peakers.
You can read Boss’s perpective after the jump.