Here’s a bizarre energy tale out of always bizarre California. Bankrupt PG&E is offering free, carbon free electric power to the state’s burgeoning “community choice aggregator” (CCA) electric distributors – which have already won a major portion of the San Francisco-based power behemoth’s load – for sales to their customers.
Among those CCAs to whom PG&E is proposing to provide free electricity is East Bay Community Energy (EBCE), which includes ultra-liberal Berkeley in its system. The offer to East Bay could be worth $11 million a year.
CCAs are local public agencies, a bit like municipal power systems, which are aggregators of wholesale power for retail resale, aimed at reducing costs and providing a “greener” power mix.
For shame, said the local activists. A letter from the East Bay Clean Power Alliance, reported the East Bay Express, said the hated utility’s offer was “a slap in the face.” The group was aghast that Nick Chaset, EBCE CEO, wanted his board to keep an open mind to the PG&E proposal.
In an interview with the local paper, Chaset said, “There are pros and cons. I’m in favor of putting the facts out there and having the board make a decision.”
Among pros to the offer is that CCAs are paying exit fees for leaving the vertically-integrated PG&E system. That’s a result of contracts that got abrogated when the aggregators left the utility. Those fees will rise this year. Chaset estimates the new fees will add 30% to East Bay’s costs.
The storied Diablo Canyon plant – two 1138-MW Westinghouse Pressurized Water Reactors, which went into service in 1985 and 1986 at an inflation-adjusted cost of $13.8 billion – are the state’s only remaining operating nuclear plants. In 2009, PG&E applied for 20-year license renewals.
But PG&E, facing serious opposition in the state, said in 2016 that it will shut down the reactors in 2024 and 2025, when their initial 40-year operating licenses expire.
While the plants were wildly controversial locally when they neared initial licensing in the early 1980s, and incurred additional construction costs when the NRC discovered major discrepancies in their construction (construction blueprints got flipped), the plants have operated well.
The nuclear station is located in a tectonically-active region, including over a major fault (the Hosgri fault), unknown at the time the plant was sited.
One way for Berkeley to avoid the exit fees would be for an early Diablo Canyon closure. David Weisman of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, pushing for an early retirement for Diablo Canyon, said early shut down would save more than the $11 million from PG&E’s offer. Chaset agreed, telling the East Bay Express he is “not opposed to early closure.” But he said, “What are you going to replace it with? We don’t want to replace it with natural gas. A clean energy replacement plan would be complicated.”
The standard California answer, of course, is renewables. But California already faces a renewable glut and an inability to economically store energy for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
— Kennedy Maize