Los Angeles is trying to lead the world in fighting climate change. But a coal plant in Utah has been L.A.’s single largest power source for three decades.
The smokestack at Intermountain Power Plant looms mightily over rural Utah, belching steam and pollution across a landscape of alfalfa fields and desert shrub near the banks of the Sevier River.
Los Angeles also hopes to import solar and wind power from the region, and to build a compressed air energy storage facility — basically a giant battery for renewable energy. Those projects, along with the gas plant, could provide an economic boost to Utah’s Millard County, where hundreds of jobs will disappear when the coal plant closes.
Intermountain Power Agency has paid more than $650 million in state and local taxes and tax equivalents over the years. The plant once accounted for 85% of the county’s tax base, down to a still-massive 35% today, Draper said. Before the coal plant, Griffiths said, “most kids had to move away unless they could stay with their family farm.” After Intermountain was built, many of those kids were able to stay.
Intermountain officials say they operate one of the country’s cleanest coal plants, thanks to pollution-control equipment paid for by California ratepayers. Residents of Delta, 10 miles south of the plant, say they don’t notice or don’t mind the air pollution. Left to right: Millard County commissioners Dean Draper, Evelyn Warnick and Wayne Jackson, with Intermountain Power Plant in the background. Los Angeles plans to replace the coal-fired facility with a gas plant.LADWP officials say they have several reasons to build a gas plant in place of the coal facility.
The new gas plant, slated to begin construction by Jan. 1, will also help Los Angeles increase its use of solar and wind power, LADWP officials said, because it will give them the physical ability to move clean energy through the 488-mile transmission line from Utah to California that currently moves coal power.
LADWP sees the Southern Transmission System as crucial to its renewable energy strategy. There’s limited space to build solar and wind farms in the Los Angeles Basin, but Utah and its neighboring states have plenty of land. Gillespie questioned whether Utah’s Intermountain Power Agency would ever block L.A.’s access to the Southern Transmission System. The wires have no economic value except to transmit electricity to California.What’s more, half a dozen power grid experts interviewed by the Los Angeles Times disputed LADWP’s claim that it needs a gas plant to move renewable energy over the transmission line.
“They don’t need to burn gas to get the electrical capabilities that they’re talking about, which they know very, very well from their own experience,” Olsen said. “The electrical issues are real, but they can be solved by non-fossil technologies.” “This is definitely within the capabilities of the technology today,” Siemens engineer Frank Schettler said.
Ric O’Connell, executive director of the Berkeley nonprofit consulting group GridLab, said LADWP was once on the cutting edge of changes in the power grid. Now he wonders if the utility is falling behind, at a time when climate change demands bold action.Of the other California cities that built the coal plant alongside Los Angeles, only Glendale has committed to the gas plant, with Burbank expected to confirm its participation soon.
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