A Broad View on Energy
Act fast--but not too fast.
Among the many contradictions swirling around California’s energy crisis, that’s the one that resonates most strongly in Ventura County this week.
With politicians and the public all clamoring for instant solutions to the threats of rolling blackouts and soaring electricity bills, there’s as much danger in taking the wrong steps as in not taking the right ones. It’s worth the time it takes to think things through before making irreversible decisions.
We understand why Southern California Edison abruptly cut off negotiations to sell 307 acres of coastal land near the Ormond Beach and Mandalay power plants to the California Coastal Conservancy. Instead the utility will take a closer look at keeping the land as sites for new electricity generators.
For the moment, at least, that action thwarts plans to preserve the areas as wetlands and could prevent a huge redevelopment project in south Oxnard.
During the many months the deal has been taking shape, the world has changed. Edison was ordered to sell off its generating plants and excess land under the state’s 1995 deregulation plan. Now, as the Legislature scrambles to fix the mess, that requirement may well change.
Edison’s incentives for selling must now be weighed against incentives for keeping it--or selling it to someone else who would build power plants--that simply didn’t exist before the crisis forced state legislators to reconsider deregulation.
The Legislature and Gov. Gray Davis last week approved the sale of $10 million in bonds so the state can enter the energy business to assure a stable, affordable supply of electricity. Building a new power plant would be more lucrative for Edison than selling the land to the Coastal Conservancy for the agreed-upon $15 million.
So Edison is smart to halt a deal that made sense last year but may not today.
At the same time, those whose only response to the perceived electricity shortage is to build new power plants--lots of them, and environmental regulations be damned--also need to pause and consider the bigger picture. California already has 10 power plants under construction; an additional 14 projects are under review with construction scheduled to start sometime this year. Those new plants will be coming online over the next one to three years. By the time a new Ventura County generating plant could be designed, approved, built and made operational, the electricity market could be glutted.
Before these prime swaths of the Ventura County coastline are reactively earmarked for industrial use rather than preservation and public enjoyment, factors other than the desire to maximize megawatts must be considered.
Similarly, we understand why the Board of Supervisors would be tempted to hastily shell out $4 million for generators to power the lights, phones and computers in the county government center on days when the grid can’t deliver. But we appreciate the board’s decision to at least consider other options--including alternative energy sources such as the sun that could move the county toward energy independence and be utterly emissions-free--before assuming that dirty, noisy super-size diesel generators are the only way to go.
Granted, the county is paying an unacceptable price for its participation in a program that allows it to save about 20% on electricity bills by agreeing to a voluntary outage when demand hits extraordinary peaks. Although the government center had experienced only seven such outages in the first 12 years of that arrangement, things changed dramatically last month. County offices lost power 14 times in January alone.
In government operations as at work or at home, the cheapest and cleanest way to match supply to demand is to eliminate waste. Supervisor Kathy Long plans to offer a resolution Tuesday that would reduce the county’s electricity demand by at least 7%. Similarly, the Ventura City Council voted to surpass the governor’s request that cities cut their energy use by 5% and instead try for a 10% reduction.
Lasting and affordable answers to the power problem must be found, and Ventura County must play its part. But to simply fall back into old approaches without looking to the future would be an opportunity lost. This is a moment for big-picture thinking--even if that takes a little time.
