AES Refuses to Guarantee Power Plant

A power company seeking approval to restart two gas-fired generators in Huntington Beach on Thursday flatly refused a city request for a $14-million guarantee that it will remedy any environmental problems should studies link the plant to polluted shores.

AES Corp., California’s largest private generator, also opposed the California Energy Commission’s plan to put a five-year cap on any fast-track permit it grants to refire the 50-year-old generators formerly run by Southern California Edison.

AES officials indicated their opposition to those conditions during workshops held Thursday by the commission, which has been ordered by Gov. Gray Davis to accelerate the approval process for energy-generating plants in an effort to rescue power-starved California.

After a full day of break-out panels at the Huntington Beach Library on a variety of environmental and socioeconomic issues, the company and the city remained in disagreement over several other conditions that various parties tried to attach to the project.

The unresolved disputes are to be taken up today during the first and only evidentiary hearing planned before a state commission committee, which is expected to issue its recommendation by March 26.

The pair of mothballed boilers, with a combined output of 450 megawatts, were scheduled for demolition. When the energy crisis deepened in December, AES applied for the fast-track permit to add the generators to the two already in operation.

Much of the local opposition to restarting the generators has centered around a theory by UC Irvine scientists that the existing generators--which already use 253 million gallons of ocean water each day as a coolant--might be combining with ocean currents to pull in sewage discharged miles offshore by the Orange County Sanitation District.

Water polluted with bacteria forced the closure of much of the Huntington Beach shoreline during the summer of 1999. City officials, worried about future cleanup costs, want to ensure that money will be available before the commission shortens the current approval process to 60 days from six months.

City officials said they looked to Morro Bay as a model to reach the $14-million figure. That city, before agreeing to allow the activation of a plant, got a commitment from Duke Energy to contribute $2 million a year for the life of the permit.

But AES thought the amount was a “giant leap,” according to Robert B. Haussler, the energy commission moderator who sat in on a panel that debated the topic.

“It is their position that they don’t think the plant is the source of the problem,” Haussler said.

Several other contested issues will be up for discussion during today’s hearing, including air emission limits, noise levels, permit length and public health. In December, AES was fined a record $17 million for spewing excessive air pollutants from its plant in Long Beach.