Natural gas-fired electric generation plants, which along with two major nuclear power facilities, line California’s 1,000-mile coast, are one of the big winners in the move last Thursday by state water control regulators to ease implementation of a ban on the use of sea water to cool the plants, which account for 40% of the state’s generation capacity.

While never specifically mentioning gas-fired plants, the staff at the California Water Resources Control Board released revised guidelines for combined-cycle power plant operators (all gas-fired) to comply with the board’s new phased-in ban on seawater cooling of coastal facilities. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), which would benefit from the proposed changes, praised the move.

LADWP operates three coastal gas-fired generation plants that have been under the gun since the ban of once-through-cooling (OTC) began to be seriously considered five years ago by the state water board.

The staff amendment still must be approved by the water board when it meets in December, but as it stands it would provide LADWP and another coastal plant operator with the option of fulfilling some conditions that would permit OTC to continue at combined-cycle natural gas-fired power plants until those units reached the end of their useful life.

“If LADWP’s [oversight commission] determines, through a public process, that continued operation of an existing power plant operated by [the city utility] is necessary to maintain the reliability of the electric system in the short-term, LADWP shall provide written notification to the state and regional water boards [and others],” a proposed staff amendment states. And it added: “In considering whether to suspend or amend the final compliance dates the state [water] board shall consult with the California Independent System Operator [CAISO].”

After first seeking an 11th-hour legislative solution in late August, LADWP began working with the water board staff to ease the impact the rules would have on the nation’s largest municipal utility (see NGI, May 10).

Leading up to the breakthrough, Interim LADWP General Manager Austin Beutner said “a tremendous amount of progress” had been made in talks this week with water board staff. He told NGI he was pleased with the water board staff’s new approach that would cut hundreds of millions of added costs for the city-run utility and allow it to commit long-term to a 100% reduction of its coastal plant sea water cooling.

“We’re very pleased with the revised set of rules,” Beutner said. “They address the concerns and issues that we raised, and that will hopefully put us on a track to resolve the problem in a way that is a win-win. We’ll actually be the first utility in the state to commit to 100% reduction in the use of ocean water to cool our plants and do it in a way that dramatically reduces the cost to our ratepayers.”

The timetable also is staggered to protect LADWP reliability over the next 10 to 20 years, Beutner said. The proposed amendment would require LADWP and other operators to file detailed implementation plans, adhere to other requirement related to repowered plants and consider the feasibility of much finer screening on water intake to reduce the impact on fish and other marine life.

He said a combination of factors makes the rules more manageable for the city utility, affecting the time, the order of the plants, the staggering and the mitigation done along the way. “All the pieces coming together now work,” Beutner said. There is more time to comply for certain plants and putting them in a new order.

Earlier when LADWP was stepping up its talks with the water board staff, Beutner characterized the joint effort as leading toward “a balanced solution” that “minimizes costs and achieves the objectives of the new once-through-cooling [OTC] policy.” LADWP will be making investments in the near term that improve power system reliability, transition away from coal and increase the mix of renewable-based power, he said.

“There is a certain engineering path to go down and the water board staff agreed that was what we should do now,” Beutner said.

In recent months LADWP had stepped up its arguments that the new sea water rules threatened its operations longer term much more than those of its private-sector counterparts, while its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have actually been reduced and will go down more in the years to come (see NGI, Jan. 8).

In the past two months, Beutner went to various business and legislative forums to reiterate that the utility would have to spend an additional $2.3 billion complying with the state water board’s phase-out. It would require a 6% electric rate hike for a period of at least eight years, Beutner told state legislative leaders earlier in August. Those estimates can now be significantly reduced, or so Beutner hopes.

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