Pollution Rules Eased for Mandalay Power Station

As California struggles to keep the lights on, county air quality officials have agreed to further relax pollution standards for one of the county’s two power plants.

The Ventura County Air Pollution Control District struck a deal late last week with Houston-based Reliant Energy Co. to allow the company to operate pollution-producing turbines at its Mandalay power station in Oxnard for up to 100 hours more than previously agreed upon.

This follows a summer deal allowing the station up to 300 hours a year, triple the production normally allowed during periods of peak demand.

The plant, one of the biggest stationary polluters in the county, puts power into a statewide grid that serves about 120,000 households throughout the region at peak times.

Power plants in Southern California are strictly regulated, and the controls often limit the amount of time they can operate.

But faced with an energy crisis that threatens to leave Southern California in the dark, regulators and energy companies are having to compromise for the time being to pump out the juice.

“We ran that plant right up to the new limitation in the summer and fall,” said Richard Wheatley, spokesman for Reliant. “We’ve run our California plants twice as hard as they’ve run since we acquired them. They’re running at full tilt.”

The trade: smoggier skies now for working lights, and presumably more blue sky down the road.

The Texas power company will be required to pay a not-yet-agreed-upon hourly fine for its extra use, and is expected to install expensive new pollution control equipment on its turbines by the middle of summer.

In last summer’s agreement, Reliant was required to pay $4,000 for each hour it ran its turbines in excess of previous limits.

But in return for concessions in the future, it will get high bids from the state’s utilities desperate for electricity.

“This gives us the opportunity to alleviate what we consider a legitimate issue,” said Tom Snowdon, plant manager. “If I wasn’t convinced there was a shortage, I would stick with the permit and say, ‘OK, we’re done . . . . We have to make enough to pay for what we’re putting into the [$5-million pollution control] project.’ ”

Regulators say the agreement is worthwhile for that reason.

It should ultimately reduce smog after a period of more emissions of nitrogen dioxide, a brown gas that contributes to ozone, airborne particles and acidic conditions in the skies.

“The state needs more electricity and Reliant needs more sales from the turbines to pay the increased cost of pollution equipment,” said Richard Baldwin, executive director of the air pollution district. “And we get the best available technology” for pollution control.

Baldwin said the new standards would allow emissions of about half a ton of nitrogen dioxide every hour the turbines run at their peak, compared to the usual 50 tons a day from all sources in the county.

Normally, the plant would not need to run the peak turbines so often and would keep below the 100-hour levels because they are so expensive to run, Baldwin said.

“It’s the generator of last resort,” he said. But, “they can do it because the bids are high enough they can afford to run it.”

The action is a trend across Southern California, although Ventura County’s agreement last summer was the first of its kind.

On Thursday before his inauguration, President Bush called for relaxing California’s environmental regulations during the energy crisis.

The latest Ventura County move occurred the same day as the South Coast Air Quality Management District--which covers Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange and San Bernardino counties--took its first steps toward overhauling how it regulates emissions from power plants.

That compromise is similar to the one Ventura County made last summer, and would allow operators to continue higher levels of emissions in the short term in return for installing control equipment they have resisted for a decade.

State air quality officials say the temporary easing of regulations may be a necessary evil.

“Obviously, the air board is very well aware of the power crunch and we have urged all of the air districts who have jurisdiction to do whatever they can to be flexible,” said Richard Varenchik, spokesman for the California Air Resources Board. “We don’t want anything done that would unnecessarily take power production away from the state at a critical time.”