Power-plant victory in San Francisco
Environmental and social-justice activists joined residents of low-income southeast San Francisco to recently achieve an important long-standing goal: the last remaining power plant in San Francisco will be closed without building a new power plant in its place.
On June 5 San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom delivered the news that state regulators had budged on a 2004 position that the city could not shut its aging Potrero Power Plant unless it built a new natural-gas power plant to replace it.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors took swift action on June 24 and Aug. 12 to reject the city's $273 million proposal to build new fossil-fuel power plants between the Bayview-Hunters Point and Potrero neighborhoods and near San Francisco International Airport.
Most of the Potrero Power Plant will now shut down in 2010, and activists and the community will continue to push for meeting the city's power needs through renewable energy, efficiency, distributed generation, and transmission upgrades so that the old power plant can be closed entirely.
The Sierra Club, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Green for All, Our City, and the Brightline Defense Project have worked together to educate the public and elected officials on the need to turn away from reliance on fossil-fuel electricity, especially when plants are sited among our most disadvantaged communities. The effort represents a successful blend of the Sierra Club's traditional environmental stewardship with environmental-justice advocacy for the rights of the low-income communities of color who have all too often been burdened by power plants.
"We must question the need for new investments in fossil-fuel generation in light of the global-warming crisis and the burden that pollution places on our communities," said Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter political chair John Rizzo.