Two additional former San Diego Gas & Electric employees who worked at Duke Energy’s South Bay Power Plant in Chula Vista, CA, came forward Thursday in a press conference in Sacramento hosted by California’s Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, adding to allegations that the merchant generator manipulated the power plant’s operations to drive up wholesale prices earlier in the year.

Duke again strongly repudiated the charges and called them similar to ones made earlier by workers who were unaware that the state transmission grid operator, Cal-ISO, was really directing the power plant’s operations during the times in question. Allegations about Duke’s plant safety, dispatching and use of natural gas were all rejected by the generator.

In response to allegations of lax safety in its plant operations, a Duke spokesperson said, “The record speaks for itself; South Bay has had no lost-time injury for over 800 days.” (Since April 1999, Duke has leased the plant from Port of San Diego, which purchased it from SDG&E in 1998.)

There were again allegations that Duke refused to dispatch power during power alerts and extremely tight peak-demand supplies, but the generator said the only time it did not operate the South Bay plant was when requested to do so by Cal-ISO or when it had to reserve pollution credits to maintain enough credits to meet its must-run obligation to the ISO.

“The only time we recall this occurring was in December of 2000 when we were at the end of our pollution credits at South Bay,” said the Duke spokesperson. “We did tell the ISO at that time that we would run if they called upon us under our must-run obligation.”

Duke also strongly denied allegations–repeated earlier by three other former workers–that it was more costly to run a small, 15-MW combustion turbine on jet fuel than increase one of the natural gas-fired main units by that same amount, as well as the fact that high natural gas prices should not have been a problem for Duke’s spot market power sales.

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