Edison on front lines of greenhouse gas effort
During the state’s energy crisis more than six years ago, the primary mission for Edison International Chief Executive John Bryson boiled down to this: Keep the lights on and keep the Rosemead company’s Southern California Edison subsidiary out of bankruptcy.
Today, the state’s second-largest electric utility could hardly be more different. It is posting record profit, spending billions of dollars on transmission and power projects and delivering record amounts of electricity to more customers than ever.
But in some ways, the challenges Bryson and his utility colleagues face now are tougher than dealing with the chaotic, disastrous electricity market meltdown that hit in 2000 and 2001. How do you provide more power to a growing state without worsening global warming? How do you meet the state’s renewable energy goals if the public opposes the necessary wind farms and transmission lines? How do you upgrade an aging power infrastructure and keep customer rates in check?
Bryson discussed those issues as well as plug-in hybrid cars, energy efficiency and other matters last week in a wide-ranging interview.
The state has committed itself to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and that has included new energy efficiency and fuel programs as well as the goal of having 20% of utility power come from renewable sources. Is it really possible to stop the accumulation of greenhouse gases while we maintain our current lifestyle?
The short answer is I don’t know. I would never say that the ingenuity of our best technological people . . . wouldn’t take us to some new special place. It would be a great thing if it did. Wind turbines are so much better than they were. Solar, we hope, can do more. . . . We see our role as being an encourager of these things.
California holds itself up as the leader in tackling greenhouse gas emissions. But how can the state take that stance when it hasn’t made the hardest choices yet?
There’s nothing in the country like what’s been done in California for the last 20 or 30 years. There’s no parallel. Energy efficiency, development of alternative energy, lower environmental impact in the aggregate. All those things.
The steps we’re taking now are big. We need to proceed urgently but deliberately, and not mess it up. The last thing we want is to do what was done, for example, in the deregulation experience in California, where a lot of people saluted deregulation, assuming competition was going to do everything. The state just did it, and the costs were pervasive, gigantic, and so on.
Doesn’t having so many players involved in this increase the odds of messing it up?
There’s certainly a lot at stake. There are a lot of participants. A lot of affected people. It depends, as almost everything does, on having reasonable processes for bringing forth the best information to make the decisions. It’s a messy process at best. But it’s my nature to think a little more on the glass-half-full side than the glass-half-empty side.
Where are you with the goal of getting 20% of your power from renewable sources by 2010? Are you going to reach it?
We have the largest percentage, and always have, among the utilities in the state of California. We’re at 17%. We think it’s going to be a big challenge. We’re not at all certain we will make the 20% by 2010. . . . Something like one-sixth of the renewable energy in the country is on the Southern California Edison system. Ninety percent of the solar energy in the country is on the Southern California Edison system. Regrettably, that’s not a big number. There’s so little there. For wind, and to an important degree, solar, the biggest issue is transmission.
Southern California Edison and the state’s other big utilities are exploring the use of plug-in hybrid cars, which would draw power from the electricity grid at times when the grid is largely idle. You’ve cited a recent study that said 73% of the cars on the road today could be fueled by the existing electric grid. What’s the outlook?
This is really a big deal. It ought to be part of the national response to greenhouse gas emissions. There would be vastly lower emissions in the context of a large power plant compared to the individual combustion engine in a car.
We’ve got this joint venture with Ford in which they’re going to bring their first 30 plug-in hybrids to us. Southern California is the logical place in the country to lead the way because of our huge air-quality challenges. Something like 40% of the greenhouse gas in California -- much higher than the national average -- is associated with just plain light-duty cars and trucks.
How do we get there?
The larger picture for us is the extraordinary investments that we’re making in the Southern California electric system that should enhance reliability, improve significantly the smarts of the system and improve the capacity of the system to do things like. . . make electric transportation a potentially large reality in Southern California. Our current base of investment in transmission as a company is $1 billion. We’re putting $4 billion in transmission over the next 5 years. So all these pieces are linked.
And in the meantime, demand keeps rising, right?
Even with the best energy efficiency programs in the country, which we have, even with the best demand-response programs, we’re going to need additional supplies. We had, from 2005 to 2007, a 10% increase in peak demand. We set this record peak [usage] of 23,000 megawatts on Aug. 31. So if you have 10% growth in peak on 20,000 megawatts, that’s 2,000 megawatts. That’s bigger than two units of nuclear power from San Onofre. It’s a monster increase.
You’ve said that the peak demand was higher than you expected. How do you get a better handle on that?
Part of it is developing a better understanding of the so-called phantom electricity load that is in almost every appliance now, the kind of ready-on features. It isn’t just the plasma televisions, which consume almost as much electricity when they’re off as when they’re on.
There are also some poorly designed appliances that have been big challenges for us. Very light air conditioners, in a stress electric situation . . . a lot of them simply go into a stall mode. A stall mode is a big electricity demand, so it results in customers having higher bills . . . and it stresses the local distribution system. So we’re working on that.
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John E. Bryson
Title
Chairman and chief executive of Edison International, parent company of Southern California Edison
Age
64
Background
Graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School and cofounder of the Natural Resources Defense Council
Previous jobs
Chairman of the State Water Resources Control Board; president of the California Public Utilities Commission; partner at law firm Morrison & Foerster
Other
Board member at Boeing Co. and Walt Disney Co.
Family
Married with four daughters
Source: Edison International
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Southern California Edison
Headquarters
Rosemead
2006 earnings
Net income, $776 million; revenue, $10.3 billion
Employees
About 15,600
Customers
4.8 million
Area served
50,000 square miles in Central and Southern California, with a population of more than 13 million people.
California power plants
San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (part owner) south of San Clemente; Mountainview Power Co. in Redlands; and Big Creek hydroelectric facilities at Shaver Lake in Fresno County.
Renewable energy
About 17% of its total power supply comes from solar, wind, small hydroelectric, biomass and geothermal facilities.
Source: Edison International
