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Calif. may ban power plants from using ocean as coolant; Spouting Off blog says yesterday’s LA Times story omitted a lot of important details

Posted by: Maven on March 2, 2010 at 7:37 am

From the Silicon Valley Mercury News:

“State water board regulators are mulling a plan to stop power companies from vacuuming the ocean for water to cool their machinery.

Environmentalists said the practice destroys too much sea life, while utility advocates said the impact is minimal. Banning the practice would cost too much, jeopardize the reliability of the electricity grid and slow the state’s transition to clean energy, supporters of the practice said.

Screens prevent larger animals from entering the plants, but fish can die while trapped against these barriers. Anything smaller than the openings in the screens, including millions of tiny fish larvae, can enter the power plants and also die.

Federal rules ban new operations from drawing in seawater for so-called “once-through” cooling systems. State regulators now want to apply this rule to the 19 existing plants from Eureka to San Diego. … “

Continue reading this story from the Silicon Valley Mercury News by clicking here.

Mark Gold of the Spouting Off blog has issues with yesterday’s Los Angeles Times coverage of this story:

” … reporter Jill Leovy missed the point. She omitted any discussion of the requirements of the federal Clean Water Act to use Best Available Control Technology to reduce larval entrainment and fish impingment in power plants. Federal courts all the way up to the Supreme Court have upheld the requirement, under section 316b of the act.

And once-through cooling (OTC) doesn’t fit anyone’s definition of Best Available Control Technology. Energy plants that use OTC literally suck the life out of the ocean, diverting millions of gallons of seawater via intake pipes to cool themselves. Somehow, the fact that every coastal power plant in California is in gross violation of the Clean Water Act didn’t get included in the article.

The Times piece didn’t include any information from the reporter’s interviews with the State Water Board or the energy agencies (California Energy Commission, Public Utilities Commission and the California Independent System of Operators) that support the draft policy.

If the Times did include this information, the reader would have seen that nearly all of the coastal power plants need to be repowered anyway because they use arcane, energy inefficient technologies. Also, the reader would have seen how California wants to move forward with the policy to self determine how OTC will get phased out rather than waiting for a one-size-fits-few approach from the federal EPA. … “

Continue reading this post from the Spouting Off blog by clicking here.

March 2, 2010 · Filed Under Oceans & Beaches

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