This monumental structure is a landmark, as are the other great electric power plants that punctuate the California coast between Humboldt Bay and San Diego Bay. Although travel guides rarely mention them, and the natural resource guides ignore them, each dominates a regional coastal landscape and triggers emotions—revulsion or admiration, or both—in the coastal traveler.

Stroll at sunset on the Redondo Beach Pier and look inland: your eyes will be drawn toward the bulky Redondo Beach Power Plant; on its south wall, a great blue whale mural glows in the slanting light. Drive south on Interstate 5 at night, just downcoast from San Clemente, and you may be startled by the exotic brightly lit twin domes of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) rising from the beach right next to the freeway. (These massive concrete structures are designed to confine any runaway nuclear reaction.)

This article offers a short tour of these familiar but unacknowledged landmarks, and also points out some coastal sites where nuclear power plants were planned but were never built. Vast changes, resulting in large part from deregulation, are now sweeping through the electric power industry. They have put power plants into the hands of new owners, opened the way for more efficient technologies for generating electricity, and confused consumers. These changes affect the future of our coastal power plants, and of the land and water surrounding them. Before this tour begins, it helps to understand something of these changes and their effects.

ELECTRICITY DEREGULATION

If you have confidence, boldness, and advanced educational degrees, you may be able to read and understand your current utility electric bill. You will see the following charges:

• Electric Energy Charge (cost of your electricity bought by your chosen electric energy provider, a utility or competing company)

• Transmission (cost of long-distance electricity transmission)

• Distribution (cost of local poles and wires to your home)

• Public Purpose Programs (cost of subsidies to low-income users, energy conservation, and renewable energy programs)

• Nuclear Decommissioning (saving up to pay the future cost of restoring the sites of nuclear power plants such as SONGS)

• Competition Transition Charge (CTC) (pays off utilities for uneconomic facilities and contracts)

• Trust Transfer Amount (TTA) (the cost of bonds issued to give you a 10 percent rate cut).

Before January 1, 1998, bills were much simpler. The state’s major private electric utilities—Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E)—owned and operated a seamless system of power plants, transmission lines, and distribution lines, all bringing electricity to you at one charge of, say, 10 cents per kilowatt hour.

But in 1996 the California Legislature passed AB 1890, which essentially moved the private utilities out of the power-generating business. With the goals of increasing competition and lowering prices, the law broke private electric utilities into three categories: generation, transmission, and distribution. PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E were required to sell their non-nuclear power plants through an auction process. The nuclear plants are very uneconomic and present safety worries, so the utilities must keep them.

With AB 1890, generating electricity from power plants became competitive. Now anyone may own a plant and sell electricity to you directly or to the Power Exchange, also created by AB 1890, which buys at the lowest prices offered by power plant operators and sells to the utilities that distribute electric power to consumers. You can buy electric energy from PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E, but also directly from other companies, such as those offering “green power,” for example. The private utilities continue to own the electricity transmission and distribution systems and are now mainly in the power distribution and customer service business.

So, back to your monthly bill. The Electric Energy Charge can involve different competing companies. The Transmission item refers to long-distance transmission of your power, handled by the new Independent System Operator, a quasi-governmental corporation that schedules power over the tall high-voltage transmission lines that traverse the state and stretch inland from the coastal power plants. Distribution refers to the cost of bringing your power from the distribution utilities’ substations over local poles and lines to your house. The byzantine Competition Transition Charge on your monthly bill pays down the utilities’ uneconomic investments, such as nuclear power plants and contracts with wind energy producers. (In the 1970s the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) required that utilities buy some energy produced from renewable sources.)

In this decentralized electric power market, Duke Energy Power Services of North Carolina, using the plant at Moss Landing, competes with coal-fired power plants in Wyoming, hydroelectricity from the Columbia River generated by the Bonneville Power Authority, and windmills in the Altamont Pass and out by Palm Springs. At the Power Exchange, price rules.

A Conservation Opportunity these coastal plants were built some decades ago on land that was cheap at the time, including dunes and wetlands. There were no laws protecting wetlands back then; their value to fish, birds, water quality, and flood protection was still not sufficiently recognized. The utilities acquired enough land around the plants for future expansion. The California Coastal Act of 1976 encouraged such expansion by essentially prohibiting development on new coastal sites while existing (already industrialized and blighted) sites can be used. The California Energy Commission can approve new units added at existing power plant sites without a Coastal Commission permit.

When they sold the coastal power plants, the utilities kept much of the land around them—land that is now appreciated for its natural resource values. Under the CPUC’s policies, the utilities must sell these lands at their fair market price to benefit the ratepayers. The Coastal Conservancy, other resource agencies, and conservation organizations are highly interested.

For example, the Ormond Beach Power Plant in Oxnard sits in a now degraded wetland. For decades, utility ownership has prevented residential and commercial development, so this property, now up for sale, presents a rare opportunity. The Conservancy has successfully negotiated with SCE to acquire and restore 600 acres and secure a protective grassland buffer around the wetland—a dream of wildlife biologists in heavily urbanized southern California.

Another major opportunity will arise whenever PG&E’s Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant is decommissioned. This plant, with two big domes, sits on a cove halfway between Montana de Oro State Park on Estero Bay and Port San Luis on San Luis Obispo Bay. It can only be seen from the air or from the sea. PG&E owns about 12,000 acres of beautiful undeveloped coastal terraces and hills—an area about 14 miles long and up to two miles wide. This land includes part of the Irish Hills, which embrace the rugged western stretch of the San Luis Range and abound with coastal scrub, coast live oak woodlands, and some of the only known undisturbed stands of coastal terrace prairie remaining in the state. The Nature Conservancy and the Land Trust for San Luis Obispo County highlight this area in their study Conserving the Landscapes of San Luis Obispo County.

It’s an ironic twist: because they were considered so dangerous that they required a safety buffer, nuclear power plants have protected valuable open space and habitat lands from development. The Diablo Canyon plant is licensed till 2025 but could close earlier. When it does, those who want to protect this land will have to move quickly. In January, the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors placed on the March ballot an advisory measure known as the DREAM initiative. It would encourage state and local officials to recognize these lands as “an exceptionally precious coastal resource,” and to take steps necessary to preserve them.

Why Power Plants Are on the Coast power plants are on the coast in part because that’s where most of California’s people live. Fewer costly high-voltage transmission lines are needed, and the power is more reliable. Another siting factor relates to oil transportation. The coastal fossil-fueled plants currently burn relatively clean natural gas. But in the 1960s and 1970s, when gas supplies were limited, oil tankers would bring fuel from refineries in Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay to marine oil terminals offshore from the power plants at Morro Bay, Moss Landing, and Carlsbad. The main reason for siting power plants on the ocean’s edge, however, was the availability of water. Large power plants need huge amounts—rivers—of cooling water. Whereas California’s freshwater river flows are fought over by cities, farmers, industries, and fish supporters, ocean water is abundant and free.

Generating electricity involves burning fuel in a boiler to turn water into superheated steam. The steam expands and rushes through a turbine, turning a shaft that spins a wire coil between the poles of a magnet. As the coil cuts through the lines of magnetic force, an electric current flows through the coil. The spent steam enters pipes surrounded by cool water, is condensed back to water, and returned to the boiler for another round, while the cooling water—now warmer with absorbed heat—is discharged. A gas-fired power plant may convert only 30–40 percent of the energy in the gas into electrical energy, with the rest expelled as waste heat into the air and water.

Coastal power plants have intake channels for ocean water, and outfalls or discharge pipes extending for miles into the ocean. The San Onofre plant pulls in 1.6 million gallons a minute. Along with cold water, the plants pull in vast numbers of fish, larvae, eggs, and other marine life. When discharged, this water is up to 20 degrees warmer. Marine life is affected by these rivers of warmed water, sometimes in unusual ways. Green sea turtles, for example, have learned to visit the outfall of the South Bay Power Plant in San Diego Bay for a more tropical experience. At the Hunters Point Power Plant in San Francisco Bay, sponges grow that are usually found much farther south.

RISE AND FALL OF THE NUCLEAR DREAM

I came to california in 1973 to research energy issues at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, just as the state’s electric utilities were moving toward their dream of clean, cheap nuclear power. After WWII they had built huge plants such as the one at Moss Landing, using inexpensive oil and gas as fuel to meet the needs of California’s rapidly growing population. The demand for electricity was increasing at seven percent a year, almost doubling every ten years.

Encouraged by the federal “Atoms for Peace” program, the utilities looked to nuclear power for future growth. The plants would cause no air pollution and would produce electricity “too cheap to meter” because nuclear fuel can create new nuclear fuel. A Rand report of the time projected nuclear plants every ten miles along the coast—a projection that helped galvanize the energy conservation movement. The dream of the utilities was to operate around the clock. At night, when electricity demand is low, the nuclear-produced electricity would pump water up behind dams. During the day the water would run back down through turbines producing clean electricity for daytime loads such as air conditioning. PG&E managed to build a first stage of this dream in the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant and the Helms Creek Pumped Storage Plant in the Sierras.

But the dream collided with major obstacles. One was earthquake faults. Opponents of nuclear power stopped PG&E’s plans to build a plant at Bodega Head in Sonoma County, right next to the San Andreas fault. A large hole in the ground—now a pond—remains as a memorial to that battle.

In 1978, the Coastal Commission produced a set of maps placing most of the coast off-limits to new power plants. This put a halt to proposals for at least five more nuclear plants at coastal sites (see p. 7). I managed that mapping project, and there was actually little controversy regarding our proposals. At that time, the utilities were discouraged both by public opposition to new power plants and, more to the point, by the San Andreas Earthquake Fault Zone, which makes the coast a risky and costly place for nuclear plants. After the Coastal Act, the industry began to consider new sites in the Mojave Desert and in Stanislaus and San Joaquin Counties in the Central Valley, but none were built except Rancho Seco, by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. So we have only three nuclear plants on the California coast instead of many.

Nuclear safety requirements grew more rigid, and the engineering needed to cope with the huge pressures and temperatures of nuclear fission caused massive cost increases. Diablo Canyon and San Onofre, planned as $500 million plants, cost $5 billion each to build. When I was at the Public Utilities Commission I had the unpleasant job of explaining to retired people living in all-electric homes—which they had been encouraged to buy because the electricity was going to be so cheap—why their bills were hundreds of dollars a month in the summer.

A mid-1970s state law prohibited new nuclear plants until a “safe and permanent” place was found and developed for spent nuclear fuel. The federal government has yet to do this, so the fuel rods have been accumulating at each plant site, a cause of worry and high cost. No more nuclear power plants are in the works in California now.

RENEWABLE RESOURCES

During the national panic about imported oil supplies and after the Arab Oil Export Embargo of 1973, both federal and California governments encouraged and required electric utilities to purchase power using renewable sources such as biomass (walnut shells, wood waste), wind, solar, geothermal, and small hydro. Engineers toyed with the concepts of harnessing tides and ocean waves and even temperature gradients between warm surface water and deep cool water. None of those technologies is considered to be cost-effective at present. The continued low cost of oil and gas and coal makes renewable resources a relatively expensive way to generate electricity. This is why electricity purchased from an energy company using “green” sources is likely to cost more than energy from the utilities bought on the Power Exchange.

Ratepayers continue to subsidize renewable resources in California through that Public Programs charge on your energy bill. The California Energy Commission recently awarded $162 million of your money collected from this charge to subsidize 55 new renewable energy projects, mainly wind farms in Kern and Riverside Counties, and some projects to recover gas from urban landfills.

WHAT'S IN STORE?

We may never see new power plants on California’s coast. No electricity producer is likely to take on the issues that would be raised by any proposal for a new plant: earthquake faults, the Coastal Commission, the Energy Commission, air and water pollution control regulations, impacts on scenery, local opposition, and others. It is much easier and cheaper to build a new coal-fired plant in Wyoming, or some other distant and less populated state, to serve California.

The three existing coastal nuclear plants continue to face serious problems. The Coastal Commission has required SCE to spend many millions of dollars at San Onofre and will demand that it spend millions more. After a $46 million, 15-year study of environmental impacts completed in 1989 at SCE ratepayers’ expense, the utility was required to take several actions. It has spent nearly $5 million on a white seabass hatchery in Carlsbad, is planning a restoration project in the San Dieguito wetlands near Del Mar, and has been experimenting with deterrents to keep fish out of the water intake system. To mitigate damage to kelp beds, fish, and other marine life, it is building a $50-million, 150-acre artificial reef, considered to be the largest such structure in the country, a half-mile offshore. On December 8, 1999, the Coastal Commission approved a $2.3 million two-year monitoring program for the mitigation projects.

Another intractable problem, which all nuclear power plants share, is storage of highly radioactive spent fuel. The U.S. Department of Energy has collected hundreds millions of dollars from utilities—and in effect from us—to develop a permanent storage site for this hazardous residue of “clean and cheap” nuclear power. But the chosen site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is still uncertain, years overdue, after billions of dollars spent. So the fuel rods remain at the coastal plants, kept underwater in steel-lined concrete pools. Last fall, the CPUC authorized PG&E to spend $7 million of ratepayers’ money to “temporarily” transfer the spent fuel rods at the Humboldt Bay plant—shut down 23 years ago—to “dry casks” in a separate structure that will be built to withstand earthquakes. The Redwood Alliance has been active at the CPUC and elsewhere in advocating that the Humboldt Bay plant be decommissioned and removed. No specific plans for doing so now exist.

How long Diablo Canyon and San Onofre will keep operating is as yet unknown. You are now paying down the high construction costs of these plants in the Competition Transition Charge on your bill. Maybe when the utilities have recovered most of these costs they will more comfortably consider decommissioning them earlier. San Onofre Unit 1 is shut down, and the much bigger Units 2 and 3 and Diablo Canyon Units 1 and 2 are getting old and highly uneconomic.

Federal regulators still have no preferred method for disposing of these plants once their use ends, although we have paid hundreds of millions of dollars—that Nuclear Decommissioning Charge on our electricity bills—toward the cost of decommissioning. One approach would involve burying the plants under tons of soil and guarding them for hundreds of years. Another would cut these plants up into pieces for transport to permanent safe storage somewhere. But the thousands of truckloads would go where? Over what routes? Stay tuned. But even shut down, the plants are likely to be at their coastal locations for some time. The endgame of America’s nuclear power program has not been determined.

As for the nonnuclear plants, most will continue to operate, at least for the next few decades. Most of those in urban areas have been designated as “must run” plants: needed to assure reliability and stabilize voltage. Power plants in downtown Redondo Beach and under the takeoff routes at Los Angeles Airport are needed to avoid brownouts and voltage surges that could destroy TVs and computers. Their new owners cannot shut them down unless new plants are built in the same service area. Some will change, become smaller and more efficient. In the long run, these “tea kettle” boiler-type electric power plants may become obsolete. We may have little photovoltaic cells on our roofs, hydrogen cells in our garages, or go “off the grid” as the renewable energy advocates dream. Or massive arrays of solar panels in orbit around the earth may beam rivers of microwave energy to us from space. Or we may return to storytelling—around Presto Logs—and forgo the benefits of electricity. Until then, the coastal electric power plants are likely to loom out of the fog along Pacific Coast Highway for our amazement and reflection.

In 20 years of California government work, Bill Ahern has dealt with power plants at the Legislature, Energy Commission, Coastal Commission, Public Utilities Commission, and now in his current capacity as executive officer of the Coastal Conservancy.

Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant

Bodega's
"Hole in the Head"

Cancelled Nuclear Power Plants

Moss Landing

Morro Bay

Diablo Canyon

Mandalay
and Ormond Beach

El Segundo
and Scattergood

Redondo Beach

Alamitos
Power Plant

Huntington Beach

San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS)

Encina Power Plant

South
San Diego Bay