Los Angeles launches campaign to roll back ocean regulation for power plants
A bill in the Legislature would delay new regulations that require the DWP to overhaul three coastal power plants to reduce the amount of seawater used for cooling.
By Patrick McGreevy and David Zahniser, Los Angeles Times
August 25, 2010 The city of Los Angeles has launched an aggressive lobbying campaign to roll back tough new state regulations meant to limit the environmental damage that power plants inflict on the oceans. Officials are pushing a last-minute bill in the Legislature that would delay by up to 11 years a new state mandate requiring that the city’s municipal utility overhaul three coastal power plants to reduce their use of seawater for cooling. The current deadlines for meeting the seawater restrictions would cost $2.3 billion more than city officials planned because it would force them to modernize power plants ahead of schedule. Such an expense would result in a 6% rate hike for electricity customers for at least eight years, officials said. “That’s money that will cause jobs to be lost in our economy and money that we can’t use to invest in other renewable energy initiatives that we have,” said Austin Beutner, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s jobs czar and temporary top executive at the Department of Water and Power, the nation’s largest city-owned utility. … The revised bill targets regulations adopted in May by the State Water Quality Control Board that mandate that power plants that use seawater for cooling switch to systems that recycle the same water over and over or use air for cooling. The switchover must be achieved by 2015 for the DWP’s Harbor power plant in Wilmington, by 2019 at its Haynes plant in Long Beach and by 2020 at its Scattergood generating station in Playa del Rey. The bill would extend the deadline for some DWP operations to as late as 2031. The state rules also affect 16 other power plants, but the bill would apply only to the DWP. …
