Power Plant Start-Up Comes a Year Early
A year earlier than initially planned, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California will begin producing electricity today at its mammoth reservoir near Hemet in Riverside County.
Four turbines at MWD’s Diamond Valley Lake reservoir will produce about 13 megawatts of electricity--enough for about 9,750 homes.
The move comes as the state approaches a summer for which energy officials have predicted rolling blackouts.
“In this crisis, every kilowatt counts,” said Ronald Gastelum, MWD general manager.
For anyone looking for a microcosm of what the energy crisis has done to change California’s thinking, the four roaring turbines at Diamond Valley Lake are a good place to start.
For openers, the California Energy Commission says the power plant at the Hiram J. Wadsworth Pumping Plant is the first new California hydroelectric facility in six years--a period during which demand was increasing and supply remained static.
Also, the hydroelectric turbines were not part of the original design of the $2-billion reservoir. “There was plenty of power in the state,” Gastelum said. “Hydroelectric was not a priority.”
But as the state tumbled into energy disarray, the MWD board voted to retrofit some of the reservoir’s pumps to produce electricity.
If all 12 pumps are altered to act as power generators--at a cost of about $4.5 million--the output will be about 40 megawatts, enough for 30,000 homes.
Opened in March 2000, the Diamond Valley reservoir is scheduled to hold 800,000 acre-feet of water when full. Energy will be generated by running water through the turbines before it is sent either to Riverside County agencies or south to its largest customer, the San Diego County Water Authority.
The MWD also is considering how to upgrade its transmission lines to draw more electricity from existing hydroelectric plants at Hoover and Parker dams on the Colorado River.
Furthermore, the MWD is looking for other locations to generate power along its complex system of aqueducts and canals, and is mulling proposals to become partners with would-be power plant builders who need water for cooling.
The megawatts produced at Diamond Valley will be sold to the state’s Independent System Operator, rather than Southern California Edison Co. or Pacific Gas & Electric Co.--and that too is a sign of how the energy shortage has changed things in California.
The MWD has long-term contracts to provide energy to Edison and PG&E; from some of its 15 other hydroelectric facilities. But those financially shaky companies now owe MWD about $2 million each, and so the MWD decided to sell to the ISO instead.
Beyond serving the state, the MWD stands to make money by selling power and increasing its stake in the energy business. It plans to use the profits to pay some of its own electricity bill, which has increased by $110 million this year.
With a fast-track approval process from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the four 6,000-horsepower pumps were converted in the past two months to be ready to produce energy for the peak-usage period of each day during the summer.
“We don’t have all the whistles and bells on it,” said David Gledhill, principal engineer and project manager for the MWD. “It is more bare-bones than our other facilities, but it’s operational.”
