Will San Francisco get rid of power plant pollution?

Most of the articles in this Yodeler focus on reducing global warming. Twenty years ago, though, energy activists talked more about the conventional air pollution - acid rain, smog, and particulate matter - produced by fossil-fuel power plants. These problems have not gone away. The proof is in Southeast San Francisco, where two large natural-gas-fired power plants have been polluting the air and damaging the health of nearby residents for more than 50 years. The old reasons for replacing fossil fuels with renewables are as valid today as ever.

San Francisco's position at the tip of a peninsula hinders importation of electricity. Most of the city's power comes up the Peninsula from the south, but to maintain the stability of the grid, there must be some generation in the city. The Hunters Point Power Plant (owned by PG&E) and the Potrero Hill Plant (owned by Mirant Corporation) fill this need. The California Independent System Operator (ISO), responsible for the reliability of electricity supplies, pays these plants' owners to keep them operating under "Reliability Must Run" (RMR) contracts.

Hunters Point is certainly the more egregious polluter of the two. Built in 1927 and not significantly upgraded since 1958, the plant consists of a gas-fired main unit capable of generating 165 megawatts (MW) and a 50 MW diesel-fired "peaker". Neither produces power economically or reliably, but when they do run, they spew nitrogen oxides (NO_x) and particulates across the Bayview/Hunters Point neighborhood, one of the city's poorest. The particulate matter, in particular, aggravates and possibly causes asthma. At the Malcolm X Elementary School, a quarter-mile from the plant, fully half the students carry inhalers for asthma attacks.

If the power plant were the neighborhood's only environmental issue, it would be bad enough, but the area also has the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Superfund site, a sewage-treatment plant, and a freeway. The people who live there rightly feel that their neighborhood has suffered enough.

Bayview/Hunters Point residents, working with various environmental organizations, have been trying to get the plant closed for at least a decade. Then-Mayor Willie Brown pledged to close it way back in 1998, but it was still operational more than five years later when he left office.

More recently, Mayor Gavin Newsom reached an agreement with the ISO to close the plant by 2007, conditioned on PG&E's completing a number of upgrades to its distribution system, including the massive Jefferson-Martin transmission line, which was recently approved by the California Public Utilities Commission. But the renewed growth of the local economy has caused the city's electrical demand to grow more quickly than anticipated, and ISO officials have already hinted that they may extend the old plant's RMR status, keeping it open, if the city's load continues to increase. Frustrated neighborhood activists are understandably accusing the state of "moving the goalposts" whenever the plant's closure draws near.

The Potrero Hill power plant, also located in the city's Southeast and also in a low-income neighborhood, was originally built in 1965, with three diesel-powered peaker units added in 1976. Currently, the 207 MW main unit is shut down for installation of pollution controls that could allow it to keep running legally for an indefinite period. But these controls will only reduce NO_x pollution; they will do nothing to reduce particulates, which are the primary cause of respiratory problems for nearby residents.

This neighborhood is home not only to San Francisco's largest power plant but also to two freeways, and as a result rivals the Bayview for the city's worst air quality. Neighborhood and environmental activists want this plant closed too. The ISO has indicated that if the above-mentioned transmission improvements are completed, and if the city gets its "Electricity Reliability Project" - three gas-fired peaker units, also located in the Potrero area - up and running, then the ISO will remove the RMR status from the Potrero plant as well. That would place considerable financial pressure on Mirant, the plant's bankrupt owner, to shut it down.

Even so, the three peakers would still burden the Potrero neighborhood with air pollution. In the end, the only real way to bring cleaner air to all the city's residents is for the mayor and Board of Supervisors to move forward aggressively to build solar and energy-efficiency projects all over the city, thus eliminating the need for fossil-fuel plants. The residents of Southeast San Francisco have waited long enough.

Doug Beach, co-chair, Chapter Energy Committee