New Plant to Generate Electricity--and Hope
It isn’t much to look at. Just a couple of big turbines housed in dun-colored buildings that crouch on a dusty oil field in western Kern County. But the Sunrise Power Plant, which officially starts production today, represents a significant turn in California’s energy fortunes.
After months in which the state’s power supplies have ebbed more than flowed, Gov. Gray Davis will flip a switch this afternoon to start up California’s first major new power plant in 13 years.
By itself, the Sunrise plant offers only a modest infusion of megawatts to the state’s electrical grid, and blackouts remain likely during prolonged heat waves this summer. Its two generators--one will be fired up today and one tomorrow--will produce only slightly more than half the power that the plant should eventually be capable of generating when it reaches full capacity in two years.
But it is a start, one that is to be followed in the next week by two fully completed plants in Northern California. Together with a hodgepodge of other, smaller sources of electrical generation, the plants are expected to give California a 3,000-megawatt boost in electricity supplies by the end of July, enough to serve between 2 million and 3 million homes.
That isn’t quite the 5,000 megawatts Davis had once promised to have in place by the start of the summer. But combined with a strong conservation effort, it is a significant addition to the state’s bulwark against blackouts.
The state’s newest source of power comes from what some might view as an unlikely source: Edison Mission Energy. Mission is one of the moneymaking arms of Edison International, whose flagship, Southern California Edison, has been laid low by the same set of circumstances that made Sunrise an appealing business prospect for its sibling.
Finished Ahead of Schedule
Edison Mission Energy is expected to earn about $1 million in state incentive awards by finishing the Sunrise plant more than a month ahead of schedule. The plant, begun Dec. 7, was completed in less than seven months, with crews sometimes working 18 hours a day, six days a week.
Its opening steals the spotlight from Calpine Corp., whose Sutter Power Plant north of Sacramento had been expected to be the first major plant to open in California since 1988. The Sutter plant is scheduled to begin official operations Monday, followed five days later by another Calpine project, the Los Mendanos plant in Contra Costa County. All three plants, Sunrise, Sutter and Los Mendanos, have been selling some power into the statewide transmission grid during shakedown tests over the last few weeks.
Edison signed a long-term contract with the state Department of Water Resources on Monday under which it will sell electricity from the Sunrise plant to the state for 10 years at an average price of 6 cents a kilowatt-hour, said Ronald Litzinger, a senior vice president with Mission Energy. That is substantially less than the prices charged by most companies, but Edison Mission Energy was bound by the terms of a larger bailout deal between the state and Edison, Litzinger said.
He said Mission Energy could cancel the power contract if the bailout failed to pass the Legislature, which appears increasingly possible.
Southern California Edison sold most of its natural gas-fired power plants to out-of-state companies after California deregulated its electricity market in 1998. The company fell into deep financial difficulty last year when an increase in natural gas rates kicked off a huge run-up in the wholesale price of electricity--including the power produced at former Edison plants. Unlike its Northern California counterpart, Pacific Gas & Electric, Edison has not filed for protection in Bankruptcy Court, but it has incurred huge debts and agreed to sell its vast transmission grid to the state.
Single-Cycle Operation
Edison Mission Energy, formed in 1986, owns about 80 power plants in nine countries and in more than half a dozen U.S. states. In addition to Sunrise, it owns nine smaller plants in California.
The plant that opens today is a relatively simple, single-cycle operation that burns natural gas to create electricity. A single-cycle plant operates much like a jet engine, burning fuel to spin turbines. The energy generated by the turbines is then converted into electricity.
By the summer of 2003, the plant will be converted to a more efficient combined-cycle plant, which turns the exhaust from the turbines into steam. The steam is then used to run another set of turbines and generate still more electricity.
As a single-cycle plant, Sunrise will be capable of producing about 320 megawatts. When it is converted into a combined-cycle operation, it will be able to produce 585 megawatts.
The completion of the three large plants in Kern, Sutter and Contra Costa counties is one of several positive developments recently in California’s electricity crisis.
Another was the decision of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to place a temporary cap on wholesale electricity prices throughout 11 Western states. And, just as significant, the California Energy Commission announced recently that Californians had not only met, but exceeded, the state’s conservation goals.
Not everything has gone so well. Many of the small “peaker” power plants--so named because they are intended to operate only at periods of peak electricity use--are behind schedule, or at least behind the timetable laid out by the state earlier this year.
“We’ve slipped on that,” conceded Claudia Chandler, a spokeswoman for the Energy Commission. Still, she insisted that the state is on track to come within a couple hundred megawatts of Davis’ 5,000-megawatt goal by the end of September--too late for the peak of the summer, but useful for the fall “shoulder,” when coastal California often experiences its hottest days.
“I think it’s working out well,” Chandler said. “I guess our learning curve here was that the development of these facilities took longer than we anticipated, but we’ll still have them in September.”
Meanwhile, after months of paying high electricity prices, the state is continuing to seek repayment for what it considers overcharges by electricity generating companies.
In Washington on Tuesday, FERC recessed an overcharge settlement conference after about 30 minutes of closed-door discussions.
Curtis L. Wagner, the FERC administrative law judge who is mediating the refund talks, said he will hold individual meetings with conference participants before resuming discussions with all parties.
California officials participating in the negotiations were expected to meet with Wagner today.
Wagner has scheduled 15 days of talks with about 150 individuals representing 70 stakeholders in the West’s electricity crisis.
On Monday, the opening day of the settlement conference, the judge admonished participants to reach agreement among themselves on how much money power generators should refund to the state. Davis has pegged the amount owed at nearly $9 billion, but state records show that figure may be flawed. Generators say the governor’s number is wildly overstated.
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Times staff writer Anuj Gupta in Washington contributed to this story.
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