Reliant Retires Aging Natural Gas Turbines
Reliant Resources Inc. said Monday that it had retired at its Rancho Cucamonga power plant two turbines that first delivered electricity when Eisenhower was president and now need costly pollution control equipment.
Although the turbines’ combined 264 megawatts represented less than 1% of the state’s generating capacity, the retirement is a symptom of a worrisome trend: Aging generators are being mothballed but few new plants are being built to replace them.
“About 40% of California’s power plants are in the 30-to-40-year-old range, and these plants are less reliable, less efficient and more polluting,” said Gregg Fishman, spokesman for the California Independent Grid Operator, which runs the power transmission grid for about 75% of the state.
“There is less and less new supply that we see in the pipeline in the next few years, and at the same time we see a growing number of plants coming off line” because the plants are too old or owners can’t afford environmental upgrades, Fishman said. “It is a source of concern.”
After the bankruptcy filing of Enron Corp. and a stubborn decline in power prices hammered the energy industry in 2001, more than half of the new power plants proposed for California were canceled or postponed.
In the last 18 months, power plants generating more than 1,400 megawatts of electricity have been shut down, with another 2,600 megawatts heading for retirement in the next three years, according to Cal-ISO.
Reliant said it retired the natural-gas-fired turbines, which were 50 years old, because the Houston company couldn’t find anyone willing to buy the units’ electricity at a price that would make the investment in pollution control equipment worthwhile.
The company said it couldn’t justify the investment “given current market conditions in California and uncertainty regarding future market conditions.”
“Had bids been received at the minimum bid levels, our intention was to move forward with the upgrades,” Reliant Western regional president Dan Hannon said.
Reliant’s remaining plants in California can generate 3,536 megawatts, or enough to serve nearly 2.7 million homes.
The plants were purchased in 1998 from Southern California Edison as part of the state’s deregulation transformation from utility monopolies to a competitive market -- an experiment that failed dramatically during the energy crisis of 2000-2001.
