No Clear Picture of Bias in Power Plant Placement

When the power plant developers came calling on Baldwin Hills, residents of that wealthy, predominantly black community took one look at the blueprints for electrical turbines in their backyard and asked: Why Baldwin Hills and not, say, Beverly Hills?

When a power plant was proposed for a largely Latino neighborhood in Chula Vista, not far from the Mexican border in metropolitan San Diego, people there wondered: Why Chula Vista and not La Jolla?

In these and other places in California, the state’s headlong rush to build power plants this year has raised a sensitive issue: Is California dumping its power plants on its most vulnerable residents, either brazenly or unintentionally locating plants--and their potentially toxic emissions--in areas that are mostly occupied by the poor and people of color?

The answer, according to a Times’ analysis of 42 new and proposed new plants, is no--and yes.

The analysis shows no evidence that the plants are more likely to be located in poor neighborhoods. About half the new and proposed plants are located in areas of above-average income--in some cases, well above average, although it is also true that none is being located in the state’s very wealthiest neighborhoods.

The plants are, however, disproportionately likely to be located near predominantly Latino neighborhoods as opposed to areas that are mostly white, black or Asian.

The Latino disparity grows glaring when one looks at proposals for the smaller “peaker” plants that have generated sporadic protests up and down the state. Those plants, meant to run during periods of heaviest demand, are small but also, by some measures, dirtier than new, large “baseload” plants. Latinos are a majority of the people living around proposed peaker plants, whereas whites are sharply underrepresented.

“You have to ask, ‘Why are they doing it here?’ ” said Michael Meacham, a city official in Chula Vista who opposed the construction of a peaker plant there. “Is it because it’s a moderate- to low-income area? Is it because it’s a predominantly Hispanic area?”

Plant operators defend the choice of sites, saying they choose them based on physical needs--such as natural gas lines and transmission lines--and not on the basis of socioeconomics. They also say that all the sites are on land zoned for industrial use and that power generation is far from the most noxious industrial process.

Environmental justice advocates questioned the siting of plants in poor areas that are already beset by serious pollution problems. Still, Anne Simon, a senior attorney with the Oakland-based Communities for a Better Environment, said she was encouraged by The Times’ finding that there was no disparity based on income. Perhaps, she said, developers have learned a lesson.

“It’s good, I would imagine, that the developers understand that they can’t, as a rule, walk into communities of color and plop down any use that they want,” she said.

Using 2000 census data and mapping software, The Times examined the racial and ethnic breakdown of people living within a three-mile radius of all the new and proposed plants. The state uses three miles as a standard for considering whether a plant will have a harmful effect on the surrounding population.

The findings:

* Thirty-seven percent of the people living around the new or proposed plants are Latino, compared with 32% of all Californians who are Latino. When only peaker plants are considered, the figure jumps to 53%.

* Forty-two percent of those around the plants are whites, compared with 47% in the general population. Again, the disparity is greater around peakers, where just 32% are white.

* African Americans and Asian Americans are more evenly represented--in fact, remarkably so. In both cases, their populations around the plant sites come within a quarter of a percentage point of mirroring their proportion of the state’s overall population. When only peaking plants are considered, both groups are underrepresented.

* According to 1997 income estimates, 21 of the areas surrounding plant sites have median household incomes above the state average, while 20 are below. One site, that of the proposed Pastoria plant in Kern County, has no residents within a three-mile radius; hence, no income.

State officials and representatives of the companies building the plants insist that any racial or ethnic disparity is mere coincidence. Roger Johnson, who is in charge of power plant siting for the California Energy Commission, said it might simply be a quirk of geography that Latinos appear overrepresented. More plants are being built in Southern California than Northern California, he said, and more Latinos live in the south.

Latinos make up 39% of the population in the seven southernmost counties in California, well above their numbers in the rest of the state.

“There was no design to achieve any kind of discrimination, or to result in these projects being located closer to one group as opposed to another,” Johnson said.

Moreover, the state has maintained that, regardless of where the plants are located, there is no undue impact on any group, saying that California’s strict air pollution regulations make the new generation of power plants environmentally benign.

Air quality officials say plants equipped with modern emission control systems are far cleaner than facilities engaged in many other industrial processes--cleaner in fact, than an office building or shopping mall that draws thousands of cars and trucks a day.

A large state-of-the-art power plant burning natural gas produces about 100 tons a year of nitrogen oxide, the ozone-producing gas that is the most harmful pollutant emitted by power plants, said Robert Reider, a senior engineer with San Diego’s Air Pollution Control District, which reviewed the proposed Chula Vista plant. The cleanest peaker plants emit about 10 tons a year, although some have been allowed to operate temporarily without pollution control devices and are spewing about the same amount of nitrogen oxide as a full-size plant.

Public Perception of Potential Harm Skewed?

But that amount is tiny compared with emissions from cars, trucks and trains. In San Diego County, for example, vehicles--mostly trucks--pour 78,000 tons of nitrogen oxides into the air each year.

In the four-county region policed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District, diesel locomotives alone dump almost 12,000 tons of nitrogen oxides a year into the air--the equivalent of more than 100 power plants.

“I believe the public is operating under some false assumptions regarding the kinds of impacts produced by power plants,” state Energy Commissioner Robert Laurie said. The “impact produced by power plants is generally an awful lot less than an adjacent industrial park that might employ 10,000 people, for example. . . . But the public has a certain image of power plant harm that I think is often unjustified by the facts.”

Early in California’s electrical development, power came almost exclusively from clean, cheap hydroelectricity, mostly generated at dams in the Sierra Nevada. Among its advantages was that it came from places where few people lived.

After World War II, the state’s utilities began building oil- and gas-fired plants to feed a fast-growing economy. They were typically built on the coastline, where they could use a limitless supply of seawater for cooling. Today, just the names of those big plants could give an environmentalist--or a real estate developer--the shivers: Moss Landing. Morro Bay. El Segundo. Redondo Beach. Huntington Beach.

The people who lived near them were overwhelmingly white and middle-class. And almost none of them objected.

“New power plants meant new tax revenues and jobs, and the general public saw the growing electric power network as part of the steady technological advance that they believed was responsible for America’s victory in war, economic dominance in the world, and rising standard of living,” historian James C. Williams wrote in “Energy and the Making of Modern California.”

The same was true, at first, of the next phase of the state’s electrical development: nuclear energy. But by the 1970s, the environmental movement had become an increasingly potent force, and nuclear plants such as Pacific Gas & Electric’s Diablo Canyon faced enormous political obstacles that ultimately halted all nuclear development in the United States.

By the 1990s, the environmental movement had taken up the banner of “environmental justice,” which offered the idea that pollution should not disproportionately affect minorities or the poor. It was a notion easily applied to development of power plants--but at the time, none was being built in California.

Today, plants are being built at a record clip, and environmental justice has been institutionalized as part of the state licensing procedure. The state Energy Commission examines every new plant proposal for its impact on the poor and minorities (even though the 2000 census established that there is no “majority” group in California).

Environmental justice has been raised as an issue repeatedly in the licensing process for the Potrero Power Plant in San Francisco, where the surrounding population is 22% Asian American, 22% Latino and 12% African American; the Pegasus Power Plant in Chino, on the grounds of a state prison; and the Cenco Electric Co. project in Santa Fe Springs, where 66% of the surrounding population is Latino.

In the blue-collar Bay Area suburb of Pittsburg, two major plants have been licensed in an area where blacks and Latinos make up about half the population, prompting the Pittsburg Unified School District, among others, to charge that environmental justice issues are being ignored.

Taking ‘Path of Least Resistance’?

Nowhere does the argument carry more weight than in Chula Vista and the neighboring Otay Mesa section of San Diego, where four new plants have been licensed within a five-mile area of scruffy hillsides and industrial flatlands that tumble up against the Mexican border. More than 80% of the people who live near the plants are Latino.

“I don’t think it’s just a coincidence,” said Josie Lopez-Calderon, president of San Diego’s Mexican-American Business and Professional Assn. “I think they took the path of least resistance.”

In politics, that is the path of expediency, often taken but rarely respected. In physics, it is the path that electricity follows, and those who plan and develop electrical power plants say they have no choice but to follow it.

Just as farmers need roads to get their produce to market, power plants need transmission lines. Because the new fossil fuel plants in California all burn natural gas, they also need access to major gas pipelines. Most plants, although not all, require large amounts of water for cooling.

“So the perfect location for a plant is where you have transmission, water and gas all coming together at the same place,” said Armando Perez, director of grid planning for the California Independent System Operator, the powerful organization that directs traffic on the statewide transmission grid.

Plant developers look for other attributes, as well. The site should be zoned for industrial use. And it should ideally be near a major utility substation, one of those jungle gyms of humming wires, breakers and transformers that adjust the voltage of electricity so that it will blend seamlessly with the rest of the power on the grid.

That puts plenty of places out of the running right from the start, including communities--often affluent ones--that might have historically resisted gas and high-voltage transmission lines.

Marin County, for instance, is the only county in a major metropolitan area of California without a single power plant, nor are any proposed there. Given the county’s reputation for environmental sensitivity, coupled with a pride of place that borders on preening, it would be easy to point a finger at Marin as the electrical equivalent of a draft dodger.

But industry officials say Marin is an unlikely spot for a power plant not just because of political opposition--although that would surely be formidable--but because it is off the path of the state’s major electrical and gas lines, and geographically isolated by water and rough terrain.

“Infrastructure is a big, big deal in this industry,” said Kent Robertson, a spokesman for Calpine, the nation’s biggest power generator and the biggest developer of new power plants in California.

But infrastructure isn’t everything.

Steve Wilburn thought he had found the perfect site to develop a power plant earlier this year. It had the requisite electric and gas lines. It was in an oil field, zoned for industrial use, and “no disrespect to the oil field, but it looked like Beirut after the bombings.”

What Wilburn did not know was that the people living around the site, who make up California’s, and perhaps the nation’s, wealthiest, most politically powerful African American community, are dedicated to turning the oil field into an extension of Kenneth Hahn State Park.

“I’m so linear thinking as an engineer and a developer of power plants that I basically looked at the oil field as an ideal location,” recalled Wilburn, president of La Jolla Energy Development. “I did not know all the other surrounding issues.”

Wilburn learned more than he bargained for when community leaders and residents gathered for two nights of hearings on the plant’s licensing last month. Among those testifying against the plant were state Sen. Kevin Murray, Assemblyman Herb Wesson, Assemblywoman Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Los Angeles schools trustee Genethia Hayes, all of whom not only represent the neighborhood but live in it.

“This is our Beverly Hills,” said one resident, Cheryl Cook, “and I want to protect it like the other Beverly Hills.”

Two days later, Wilburn wrote a letter withdrawing his application for the project.

Few other communities have the organization and clout of Baldwin Hills.

No members of the Legislature appeared at any of the hearings held to consider the four Otay Mesa and Chula Vista plants, nor did any other elected officials, with one exception: Bill Horn, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors, who appeared at one hearing to express the board’s unanimous support for the large Otay Mesa plant.

Mounting Organized Opposition Seen as Key

Actually, many people in the area supported the plant, which is in a sparsely populated spot near the Mexican border.

But when two peaker plants were proposed to be built within a mile of the main Otay Mesa plant and a proposed peaker in Chula Vista, many residents of the surrounding area felt they were being singled out.

Developers of the Chula Vista plant eventually backed out, although for economic, not political, reasons. They still hold the license and could revive their plans; still, opponents saw the decision as a victory.

But the opponents also acknowledge that several of the proposed plants nearly slipped through the emergency 21-day licensing period before anyone noticed. The lack of organized communitywide protests, such as those seen in the Baldwin Hills, illustrates one reason that some communities are more likely to have power plants built in their midst than others, and why the state’s accelerated licensing process disturbs some environmental activists.

“How much organized opposition can you get in a 21-day permit process?” Lopez-Calderon asked.

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Data analysis by researcher Maloy Moore and director of computer analysis Richard O’Reilly.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Power Plant Placement

New and proposed power plants in California counties are dis-proportionately likely to be near predominantly Latino neighborhoods, according to a Times analysis. The disparity grows in areas where smaller “peaker” plants are proposed.

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Areas Around New and Proposed

Power Plants in San Diego County

The widest disparities are found in San Diego County. The chart at right below shows the percentage of Latino and non-Latino population within a three-mile radius of each plant.

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Power plant % Non-Latino % Latino Calpeak Border 17% 83% Calpeak Escondido 59% 41% Chula Vista 38% 62% Larkspur 20% 80% Otay Mesa 15% 85% California average 68% 32%

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Source: U.S. Census Bureau. Data analysis by Times researcher Maloy Moore and Times director of computer analysis Richard O’Reilly