Innovative Power Trade at SoCal Edison : Utilities: Pacific Northwest plants will supply some Southland electricity needs this summer, helping the region to cut pollution.
Expanding an innovative arrangement begun last year, Energy Secretary James D. Watkins Thursday signed agreements between the Bonneville Power Administration and three big Southern California utilities to exchange up to 725 megawatts of electricity in 1992.
Bonneville, the federal agency that markets hydroelectric power from federal power plants along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest, will generate extra electricity this summer to be sent to Southern California. In the process, water flow in the Columbia River will be increased to help the migration of endangered salmon.
Low river flows can kill salmon trying to migrate both up and downstream. Bonneville has agreed to National Marine Fisheries requests to increase the summer flow to help improve the salmon’s survival rate.
Southern California will use Bonneville’s electricity during the air-conditioned summer months of peak power usage, instead of generating power locally at smog-producing fossil fuel plants. This fall and winter, when the Northwest needs more power for heating, the utilities will send roughly the same amount of power back to the Bonneville system.
“While this agreement makes economic sense,” said John E. Bryson, Southern California Edison’s chairman and chief executive, “the principal purpose of this exchange is to improve the environment in both regions.”
Bryson and a former Bonneville administrator, Jim Jura, set up the first such exchange--for 200 megawatts--last year. The 725 megawatts to be traded is enough electricity to power 725,000 average California homes per day.
The utilities--Edison, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and San Diego Gas & Electric--made separate agreements with Bonneville, as did the California Department of Water Resources. Energy Secretary Watkins signed the agreements at Edison’s Sylmar converter facility in Sylmar.
The California Energy Commission forecasts peak demand this summer for the three utilities of about 27,000 megawatts of electricity.
The three utilities estimate that the trade will keep 258 tons of pollutants out of Southern California skies this summer. And DWP, for one, plans to generate its share of the replacement power out of state, at its Intermountain Power Project plant in Delta, Utah.
“It will result in minute increased emissions in Utah,” said Eldon A. Cotton, DWP assistant general manager for power. But South Central Utah does not have a significant smog problem, Cotton said.
