The Morro Bay Power Plant: Past, Present and Future - Part 3
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(Continued)
On the impacts of dry cooling units, it said: "We have determined that . . . the Project will not have a significant impact on marine resources. On the other hand, although the cooling alternatives (some form of closed-cycle cooling, such as dry cooling) would certainly further reduce or eliminate the remaining aquatic impacts of the proposed Project, all of these alternatives would also impose numerous other significant environmental impacts in the areas of visual, land use, and probably noise. Thus, imposing . . .dry cooling... would cause greater harm to the overall environment in Morro Bay than would the proposed Project with an associated HEP." (Closed-cycle cooling would not have "further" reduced aquatic impacts. It would have eliminated them completely. The CEC staff concluded that visual, land use, and noise impacts from such cooling units would have been insignificant, which the CEC decision failed to mention.)
On the value of the existing plant and the need for continued operation, it said: "The existing Morro Bay Power Plant is a viable operating power plant and an active participant in the regional western electricity market." (The CEC may have considered the existing plant to be "viable," as Duke claimed, but two of its four units were shut down even before the August 2, 2004 final CEC decision. The CEC staff had said the plant's days were numbered and were proven correct.)
On the cost of a new plant, it said: "Applicant estimates the cost of the Project to exceed $800 million. The Project will include the demolition of the on-site fuel oil tank farm, construction of the new combined-cycle power block, and demolition of the existing power plant complex." (The fact is, Duke had been widely quoted for years as saying the new plant's capital cost would be about $600 million. When the CEC staff recommended dry cooling instead of once-through cooling using estuary water, Duke claimed it would cost an additional $200 million for a total of $800 million. It submitted no evidence of the $200 million cost and the CEC requested none. The CEC staff and a consulting firm estimated the net cost would be about $50 million.)
The decision quoted CAPE's arguments at length on many of these points:
--" . . .Intervenor CAPE filed testimony challenging the quantification of Project emissions of PM and the sufficiency of mitigation offsets for PM impacts . . . CAPE claims that that the Project's estimated PM emission levels, based on Applicant's estimates and included in the Air District's FDOC, are grossly understated . . .The CAPE witness also alleged a lack of evidence of any vendor guarantee or specification which supports Applicant's estimated emission rates . . .In CAPE's view, not only are emission rate estimates too low, as noted above, but of the ERCs that are provided by Duke, CAPE contends a significant portion is made up of offsets which are "phantom" or "paper offsets," and do not actually mitigate impacts."
--"CAPE accuses the document of ignoring its argument that ERCs issued for the shutdown of the existing plant are incorrectly based on anomalous years of operation, the baseline for ERC calculation included a portion of the year 2000, it included a year during California's 'energy crisis' when the existing plant experienced higher than average use and which therefore threw off the baseline average."
--CAPE argued "the Project cannot be permitted if the total estimated cancer risk exceeds ten in a million. In addition, any project causing a risk greater than one in one million must install TBACT (t-Butyl Acetate) on equipment which increases toxic emissions. Table 4 from the FDOC shows that toxic emissions from the Project do not exceed absolute thresholds of ten in one million risk for cancer causing compounds. However, TBACT levels are exceeded. The dominating cancer risk and health hazard pollutants are diesel exhaust particulate from the diesel standby engines and acrolein from the turbine exhaust."
--"The only party offering testimony in fundamental disagreement with the experts noted above is CAPE. CAPE takes the primary position 1) that the PM emissions used by the Applicant, Staff, and Air District are understated, 2) that epidemiological studies establish that any increase in ambient PM constitutes a significant public health impact, and 3) that erroneous calculations for PM emissions and inadequate emission reduction offsets will result in the Project creating a significant increase in local PM emissions thereby causing a significant air quality and public health impact under CEQA.
But the decision did not respond to CAPE's specific points, except the last one in a very general way: "However, weight of evidence establishes that the Project as proposed, including duct firing, will not result in any significant local impacts from PM, under any operating conditions." The same was true for the CEC staff's points, none of which was addressed specifically.
In April, 2003, the CEC panel overseeing the project review, issued a preliminary PMPD (presiding members proposed decision), which recommended licensing the Duke plant project. Even more than disappointment, it was the disbelief that all the facts, all the evidence, and all the holes in the pro-plant arguments could be ignored. A few months later, a final hearing was held in Morro Bay, where the panel heard that disbelief.
Then, the CEC was silent for almost a year. The hope was that maybe the panel was reconsidering its recommendation in light of the criticisms voiced at the hearing and the challenges to its findings in the preliminary decision. But as it turned out, the CEC was wrestling with what to do about Duke's proposal to eliminate the Coastal Commission from the CEC review process. Ultimately, it decided to keep the commission in the process - and avoid litigation that would have held up the licensing of the plant for considerable time - but to override the commission's support of dry cooling, which the CEC has limited authority to do.
At that final hearing, Pam Soderbeck (the former attorney who wrote two detailed research reports on particulate matter and worked with attorney Bonnie Churney to assemble CAPE's case on air quality), stole the show with her comments, which were edited for this report:
"I was very cynical coming into the whole process as a former lawyer. And as time went by and I put more and more into it, as did all the other parties, I became more hopeful that in fact the process itself had a lot of integrity. I was wrong. That hope was totally dashed with the issuance of the PMPD. The approval of the project with only minute changes has been preordained all along. That is the only conclusion I can come to.
"The decision illustrates what I'm saying, I think, through the travesty of its analysis. I was most interested in the specifics of air quality, but I also took a quick review of other sections that show the same thing is happening over and over.
"Either the decision is trying to be very clever and put the trappings of logical analysis before the public in a lame attempt to justify the preordained decision, or the conclusions are just plain wrong - or, the analysis was incredibly lazy. I don't think you all are stupid, nor do I think you're lazy. What I saw in the decision is sophistry, specious reasoning, fallacy, illogical, irrational, and unsound. From everything I've heard about the dry cooling versus wet cooling, I think that probably qualifies for that.
"There's also another type of problem in the reasoning - the opinion where it begs the question (when) there is a fact which may be true, (and) there's another fact that may be true. The two have nothing to do with each other. But a conclusion is drawn that really relates to neither one. In the modeling, it cites that the Duke witness is confident that the model is conservative. Then it goes on to say the staff witness cites testimony that the modeling may over-predict. But it doesn't address that same staff witness' testimony in the transcript that says he's also seen it under-predict on occasion. This is cherry picking.
"And then it goes on that the increased levels of modeled particulate matter can't be picked up on the most sensitive monitors. Conclusion, no problem. But that's supposed to convince the public under a CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) analysis that this is perfectly safe and good. It's just an incredible disappointment. I can understand that people are pulling the wool over my eyes - at least so far.
"I really encourage some very thoughtful review of this preliminary decision by the entire commission, because things like that can't stand. And the sad thing is that they would make an excellent appeal base (for litigation to overturn the decision)."
Many CAPE members and residents voiced similar objections to the decision at that last hearing. Former mayor Rodger Anderson, City Council member Janice Peters, former city Planning Commission chair John Barta, and a Morro Bay Chamber of Commerce representative spoke in favor of the Duke project (even after Soderbeck made her comments).
In adopting its final decision, the CEC took the unusual, if not unprecedented, step of not "docketing" the decision, which is necessary to make it legally final. The CEC's explanation was that it "could not be implemented" until the Regional Water Quality Control Board approved the habitat enhancement program meant to compensate for the destruction of larvae from the once-through cooling that the CEC had approved and the water board staff supported.
But it wasn't clear why finalizing the CEC decision had to await the water board's action, which would come later as a normal course. The suspicion was that the CEC sought to protect itself from a lawsuit, which Soderbeck mentioned, by not finalizing its decision. If it waited until the water board acted, that agency would be the target of any such litigation.
But why would the CEC want to protect itself from a lawsuit since state law requires such a suit go directly to the California Supreme Court, which apparently has still never even accepted litigation challenging a CEC power plant decision? Could it be that the CEC didn't want to risk spoiling that clean litigation history in view of the evidentiary record in the Morro Bay case, which is arguably the worst ever?
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