SC Edison’s Fossil Fuel Generating Stations Upwind Of Malibu Off Death Row, Again
Written by 991KBU on August 25, 2020
Power plants that sit next to the ocean … and boil tons of ocean water every day to generate steam for electricity … have been a fixture in California for decades.
But they are heavily polluting of the air … they use old and inefficient methane boilers … and they boil to death millions of small marine creatures every day.
One of them is 30 miles upwind from Malibu … in Oxnard.
The state has been trying to close them down for years … and they were set to be mothballed finally this year.
But all of a sudden … California finds itself short of electricity.
Particularly after sunset … when demand is still high but solar generators start shutting down.
Some oil industry observers say California moved too fast into green power.
But others point out that major Wall Street companies have been caught several times before … making hundreds of millions of dollars by manipulating the market … turning their power plants off when power runs short … and turning them on again when spot prices spike.
The state is investigating if that is happening again.
The Calif0rnia Public Utilities Commission is about to to decide whether the methane gas-fired power plants along the Southern California coast should keep running past 2020.
The aging and inefficient facilities are owned by out of state energy companies …. but their power output has nbeen purchased by Southern California Edison under a long term contract approved by the state.
The price … and the profit margins … are both secret … under terms of the SCE deal approved under official secrecy by the CPUC.
That deal was set uo when the then-president of the CPUC was secretly meeting with Edison to engineer a ratepayer bailout of the disastrous SCE remodeling project at San Onofre.
In that case, ratepayers ended up paying 4 point 5 billion dollars to clean up the mess after the nuclear plant literally shook itself to death … after Edison and its contractors botched the supersizing of the nuke plants.
