Kern County Basks in Role as State’s Blackout-Buster
You could think of this as California’s own little slice of west Texas.
Here in the scruffy brown hills of western Kern County, oil rigs grow more easily than trees, pickups are more common than cars, and chicken fried steak is the most popular dish at Mike and Annie’s McKittrick Hotel.
The hotel--which no longer offers lodging, just food and drink, and plenty of it--is bustling these days with the roustabout energy of a Lone Star construction camp. Just down the road, a mammoth electrical power plant is rising out of the sagebrush, its generators housed in four boxy buildings the size of airplane hangars.
It is one of six new major gas-fired power plants expected to be built in Kern County over the next several years, an electrical construction boom unmatched anywhere in California. Kern, which already has a large surplus of electricity, is cementing its place as California’s energy capital, assuming far more than its share of the burden in recharging the state’s drained power supplies.
Over the next several years, the county will add nearly 5,000 megawatts of power to the statewide grid. That is more than California now imports, on average, from out-of-state suppliers. It’s enough to supply about five counties the size of Kern, which fills the dusty southern rim of the San Joaquin Valley and has a population of 662,000.
In some parts of the state, a proposal to build a new power plant is a call to throw up the barricades. In recent months, intense community opposition has forced developers to pull back proposals to build major plants in South Gate and San Jose, although Gov. Gray Davis has tried to revive plans for the San Jose plant.
You don’t hear a lot of not-in-my-backyard talk in Kern County.
“There should be power plants in everybody’s backyard,” said Paul Gipe, chairman of the Kern chapter of the Sierra Club, which did not oppose any of the new plants. “If people are concerned about having too many power plants, they should think twice when they flip on the light switch.”
New, natural gas-fired power plants, Gipe reasoned, are relatively clean and will not add significantly to the county’s serious air pollution problems. Ideally, he said, they will allow the state to close some older, dirtier plants that cause considerably more environmental damage.
If environmentalists don’t oppose the plants, it’s not too much of a leap to guess that some people might be positively thrilled about them.
Just try, for instance, asking somebody in Taft, an oil center south of McKittrick. “It’s more money coming into Kern County--that’s the way I look at it,” said Pamela Dunlap, who runs a downtown thrift shop.
An Economy Rooted in the Oil Industry
She stood in the twilight outside her shop, on a street that embodies many of the most attractive attributes of small town Americana--with one small difference. Where some towns might have statues of their founders or war heroes in prominent public places, Taft has erected small oil rigs and other pieces of drilling machinery, a reminder of its economic roots.
That Kern County has stepped up as California’s blackout-buster is, perhaps, not surprising.
To begin with, there’s geography. Kern stands astride California’s major north-south electrical transmission lines at precisely the spot at which they divide between the service areas of Pacific Gas & Electric, which serves Northern California, and Southern California Edison. That spot can be pinpointed as the Midway substation, a vast jungle of humming wires, transformers and circuit breakers that lies a short distance west of Interstate 5 in the town of Buttonwillow.
Already, massive new circuit-breakers--they look like Frankenstein helmets sprouting 5-foot-long sparkplugs--are being erected at Midway to handle the power from two major plants that will be revving up in the coming months: PG&E; National Energy’s La Paloma plant, the one near McKittrick; and Edison Mission Energy’s Sunrise plant, just south of Taft.
The county is served by two major natural gas pipelines, which will be tapped to run the plants. In fact, Kern contains the state’s largest known reservoirs of natural gas.
Another of Kern’s geographic advantages?
“You look around, and you’ll see there aren’t a lot of people living around here,” observed Stephen Whaley, who is overseeing construction of the Sunrise plant. In the surrounding hills, an orchard of oil rigs bobbed in the morning haze. Dirt roads cut crudely across the landscape, bisecting a crisscross of steam pipes, fuel lines and electrical wires.
“This area is all about oil,” Whaley said. Casting a glance at the modular 560-megawatt plant rising behind him, he added with a wry smile, “You know, I guess you could look at this from the road, and you could make the argument that it improves the looks.”
The Sunrise plant, a relatively simple single-cycle plant, is expected to fire up 320 megawatts of its total output by Aug. 1, a scant nine months after construction began. The other plants--more complex and efficient dual-cycle operations--will be opening over the next several years, assuming all receive final approval.
The lack of major opposition to the plants is, of course, another reason developers see Kern County as a good place to build. The county has long had a more intimate relationship with energy--oil, gas, electricity--than most places. To people here, the link between a natural gas well and a lightbulb, or an oil derrick and a gas pedal, is neither theoretical nor especially threatening. They’re comfortable with energy.
Kern produces more crude oil than any other county in the United States outside Alaska. Property taxes from oil companies have helped build handsome new schools in Bakersfield, the county seat and largest city. The companies’ big payrolls have helped populate elegant subdivisions with names that sound vaguely Houstonian: Seven Oaks, River Oaks, Landmark Estates.
Which brings us to the Texas connection.
It’s hard to overlook it, in a county that runs on oil and cotton and boasts a country music scene to rival Austin’s. Conversations in the finer Bakersfield restaurants are filled with references to trips to Texas, of colleagues in Midland and Odessa. A Bakersfield radio station was running a contest recently: The winners would be flown to a bull riding championship in Houston.
Until December 1999, American Airlines offered direct jet service between Bakersfield and Dallas. It stopped after Occidental Petroleum moved its headquarters from Bakersfield to Houston.
This is a county where President Bush received more support in the November election than he did in Texas, his home state. But then, Bush already had a Bakersfield connection: He lived there briefly as a child when his father, former President George Bush, worked in the Kern oil fields.
“You look at the topography around Bakersfield, and the county’s morals and ethics--that predominantly conservative attitude that we have around here--and you look at the oil, and you could be in Midland,” said John Allen, the general manager of Occidental of Elk Hills, which is developing a power plant in tandem with Sempra Energy of San Diego.
A lot of people in Kern County will tell you they don’t mind being an energy farm for the state. It’s a living, after all.
“It’s good to be working at home,” said Joe Ryan, a Bakersfield pipe welder who has spent years on the road seeking the heavy construction work that seemed to have vanished in his hometown. Now he’s working at the La Paloma plant, a 1,048-megawatt behemoth that will come online in phases beginning in December.
About 800 people are at work on the plant, and several hundred more will be employed in the coming months. And after that plant is done, there will be others to build.
“This is a good job here, I tell you what,” said Ryan, 47, who has been banking his overtime on six 10-hour days a week--sometimes more.
County Sees Itself as ‘Part of the Solution’
But there are some signs of simmering resentment, especially among county leadership. After all, if every other county produced just half the electricity that Kern generates, California wouldn’t have an energy crisis. And people in Kern County are getting hit with the same spring-loaded electricity bills, the same rolling blackouts as everybody else.
“I think the people of California are either going to be part of the solution or part of the problem,” said Assemblyman Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield). “And in Kern County, we have a long history of being part of the solution, especially when it comes to energy issues.”
Elsewhere in the state, Ashburn sees “a lot of arrogance--people who enjoy the benefits of a very high quality of life, enjoy the benefits of electric power for jobs and for their personal life, but with an exclusivity that it’s someone else’s problem to create that for them. We don’t have that attitude in Kern County.”
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Power Buildup in Kern County
Six new major gas-fired power plants are expected to be built in Kern County over the next several years, making the county the power capital of the state.
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