California regulators have made preparations to close Diablo Canyon, the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant, in a move quickly characterized as a turning point in the nation’s approach to energy production and use.

“Pacific Gas and Electric Co. announced Tuesday it will close California’s last nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, in 2025, ending atomic energy’s more than a half-century history in the state,” noted the San Francisco Chronicle. “The move will shutter a plant whose construction on a seaside cliff surrounded by earthquake faults helped create the antinuclear movement. And yet, some conservationists have fought to keep Diablo Canyon open, arguing California needed its output of greenhouse gas-free electricity to not exacerbate global warming.”

In fact, nuclear power has staked a claim to greater efficiencies than other forms of energy such as wind, driving critics of prevailing environmentalist policies to cast Diablo Canyon as a relatively smarter way to meet anti-carbon objectives hard to dislodge from Sacramento. “Nuclear energy is a huge source of clean power that doesn’t release the greenhouse gases that are changing the climate,” according to the U-T San Diego editorial board. “And unlike the San Onofre plant in San Diego County that closed in 2012 because of severe problems with steam generators and more, the Diablo Canyon plant appeared to be functioning well.”

Key players in the state’s environmentalist movement, however, determined that nuclear power represented more of an obstacle to their agenda than a source of potential allies. The proposal to shut down Diablo Canyon, “part of an agreement with environmental and labor groups, is intended to help meet California’s aggressive clean energy goals, which have already transformed the power mix with a large and growing renewable energy fleet at a time of slowing electric demand,” the New York Times reported. “It also comes after years of public pressure to close the plant, near San Luis Obispo, because of safety concerns over its location, near several fault lines, and its use of ocean water for cooling.”

Final approval for the change must come through the California Public Utilities Commission. “The agreement calls for PG&E to withdraw its pending application to extend the licenses for another 20 years, and to replace the plant’s 2,240-megawatt capacity with a combination of efficiency improvements and renewable sources,” as the Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hitzlik noted. “Among the deal’s unique features are provisions for $350 million in retention, severance and retraining payments to existing workers and $49.5 million in payments to San Luis Obispo County as compensation for the loss of a major source of employment and taxes.”

As legacy players in the public and private sector have haggled over the costs and benefits of nuclear power production, innovators have pushed the conversation in a different direction. Although advances in the efficiency of solar power production and retention have become something of a political football in recent years, with Democrats at the state and federal level bent on subsidizing businesses geared toward solar and other nontraditional power sources, alternate-energy entrepreneur Elon Musk has forged ahead with what appear to be plans for a dramatic new play in the space. 

With his Tesla company’s bid to acquire SolarCity, as Fortune suggested, “a fully vertically integrated energy company—from energy generation to installation to storage to application—could create a massive Elon Musk Energy Empire. It would be a company that generates power from the sun, stores energy in batteries, and uses those batteries to power cars and buildings.”

“And it would all be provided by a brand that consumers increasingly know and are excited about. Tesla’s brand is starting to be so powerful that it’s as if Apple decided it wanted to be a full-fledged power company (oh wait, it’s kind of doing that). But never before has the energy industry had such a player that so was so attractive to consumers and also so willing to act disruptively.”

But there’s a twist to this story. Recent coverage suggests that PG&E might not put up a fight when its 40-year federal licenses for Diablo Canyon’s two Westinghouse-made nuclear reactors expire in 2024 and 2025. While PG&E’s website depicts a 20-year extension of the licenses as a no-brainer way to keep supplying clean, non-greenhouse-gas power to more than 3 million people, the company’s dithering on the regulatory front has caught environmentalists’ attention.

This is from a recent Los Angeles Times account:

Although PG&E has asserted that the plant’s continued operation would save its customers as much as $16 billion during the additional 20 years, the cost of bringing Diablo Canyon into compliance with environmental and seismic mandates may in fact not be worth the effort.

 

Energy regulators and advocates have few clues to whether PG&E’s goal is to seek Diablo Canyon’s renewal or find an easy excuse for shutting it down early. “They’re so cagey about the future that I can’t help thinking there’s a strategy here,” says Matthew Freedman, a staff attorney for the consumer watchdog group Turn.

 

Freedman believes the utility’s intention is to delay the renewal proceeding long enough to hamper any opposition. In 2007, the state Public Utilities Commission directed the utility to decide whether to seek renewal at least 10 years in advance of the license expirations, so energy planners would have time to figure out how to replace Diablo Canyon’s output if the plant went dark. Waiting much longer would be “reckless and gambling with the public interest,” the PUC said.

Utility: ‘We’ve got a lot on our plates’

A San Francisco Chronicle report, however, is less conspiratorial in its analysis, depicting PG&E leaders as more interested in other issues — starting with damage control with the utility’s reputation over its pending federal criminal trial:

Once eager to extend Diablo’s licenses, company executives now say they aren’t sure. Since the deadly 2010 explosion of a PG&E natural gas pipeline beneath San Bruno, their focus has been on reforming the company and repairing its image, not relicensing Diablo.

 

And any extension will involve a fight. The plant sits within a maze of earthquake faults, all of them discovered after construction began in 1968. Seismic safety fears have dogged the nuclear industry in California for more than 50 years, forcing PG&E to abandon plans for one of its first reactors.

 

“We’ve got a lot on our plates, and we just don’t need to take on another big public issue right now,” said Tony Earley, PG&E Corp.’s CEO.

 

If Diablo closes, no nuclear plant will take its place. California law forbids building more until federal officials come up with a permanent way to deal with the waste. Thirty-nine years after the law passed, that still hasn’t happened.

This aggravates nuclear power advocates, who thought the deep concerns many have about global warming would lead to a renaissance for nuclear power in California and elsewhere. Instead, Japan’s 2011 disaster at its Fukushima nuclear plant has blunted momentum.

Anti-nuclear activists have spent years comparing conditions at Diablo Canyon with those in Fukushima, suggesting its location on or near several seismic fault lines could lead to a Fukushima-style tragedy along the Central California coast. But the claims of close parallels have generally been discounted by conventional California media.

PG&E’s Diablo Canyon plant, the state’s last, has wound up in the crosshairs. As the Associated Press reported, “the company is evaluating whether to meet a tangle of potentially costly state environmental requirements needed to obtain renewed operating licenses.”

“The issues in play at Diablo Canyon range from a long-running debate over the ability of structures to withstand earthquakes — one fault runs 650 yards from the reactors — to the possibility PG&E might be ordered by state regulators to spend billions to modify or replace the plant’s cooling system, which sucks up 2.5 billions of gallons of ocean water a day and has been blamed for killing fish and other marine life.”

The fault in question has rattled nerves in the area and throughout the state. “Even before the twin reactors produced a single watt of electricity, the plant had to be retrofitted after a submerged fault was discovered 3 miles offshore during construction,” the wire noted separately. “That cleft in the earth, known as the Hosgri fault, has long been considered the greatest seismic threat to a plant that stands within a virtual web of faults. But new questions are being raised by sophisticated seafloor mapping that has found that the Hosgri links to a second, larger crack farther north, the San Gregorio fault.”

Increasing emissions

At the same time, the environmental implications of an end to nuclear power have also raised serious concerns. The last California plant to close, in San Diego county, shuttered amidst problems with its infrastructure. California’s public utility commission “approved a shutdown deal last year with the San Onofre plant’s co-owners, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric Co., that assigned about 70 percent of the $4.7 billion shutdown bill to the firms’ customers,” as the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “The companies closed San Onofre after a January 2012 leak of radioactive steam revealed widespread damage to its cooling system.”

The consequences of the closure have worked against anti-carbon policies pushed hard from Sacramento under Gov. Jerry Brown. “With the San Onofre closure, annual statewide emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases linked to electricity production in California jumped by 24 percent,” U-T San Diego observed. “In San Diego, the local electric utility commissioned a major new natural gas plant and will replace an aging plant with new equipment to keep natural gas generators at the ready.” According to expert analysts, the paper added, “the experience could be replicated on a larger scale as many U.S. nuclear plant operators struggle to compete with cheaper sources of energy.”

Innovating nuclear

In response to the dilemma, some leading Californians have come out in favor of revitalizing nuclear power on a more advanced and, presumably, safer footing. In an editorial at The New York Times, Peter Thiel used the recent Paris conference on climate change to force the issue. “If we are serious about replacing fossil fuels, we are going to need nuclear power, so the choice is stark: We can keep on merely talking about a carbon-free world, or we can go ahead and create one,” he wrote.

“We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. This is most obvious in poor countries, where billions dream of living like Americans. The easiest way to satisfy this demand for a better life has been to burn more coal: In the past decade alone, China added more coal-burning capacity than America has ever had. But even though average Indians and Chinese use less than 30 percent as much electricity as Americans, the air they breathe is far worse. They deserve a third option besides dire poverty or dirty skies.”

The board will take up possible changes in state rules affecting Diablo Canyon’s cooling water intake structure, a common feature of power plants build next to large bodies of water that are crucial to reducing excess heat during power production but that also can hurt nearby ecosystems. Diablo’s two nuclear generators, which produce more than 2,200 megawatts total, are located on the Pacific Ocean 13 miles south of San Luis Obispo.

It’s considered highly unlikely that the state water board would do anything dramatic. Federal law leaves the most important decisions on nuclear plants to federal authorities. But greens believe that their years of raising questions about the San Onofre nuclear power plant helped clear the way to the decision to shutter the north San Diego County facility in 2011 after it had severe problems with defective steam generators at both its towers.

The owner of the Diablo Canyon plant, Pacific Gas & Electric, has quietly made major progress toward keeping the plant in operation through 2045. This is from a July 13 greentechmedia account:

The license renewal process for Diablo Canyon, California’s last remaining operational nuclear power plant, has just been restarted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

 

Diablo Canyon’s reactors became operable in 1985 and 1986 and their licenses expire in 2024 and 2025. … PG&E started applying to the NRC for a 20-year license extension in 2009, but Japan’s Fukushima incident put the extension on hold until new seismic studies for Diablo Canyon were completed and submitted to the NRC and California Public Utilities Commission.

 

In September of last year, the seismic study conducted by PG&E to determine the safety of the Diablo Canyon plant found that the facility was “designed to withstand and perform [its] safety functions during and after a major seismic event.”

Seismic study sure to face questions

This study is sure to face sharp criticism at the state water board meeting next week. A preview of the criticisms can be seen in a San Francisco Chronicle story on the seismic report earlier this month.

Activists who never wanted Diablo in the first place have been pushing hard to close it, particularly after California’s only other commercial nuclear plant — San Onofre, north of San Diego — shut down in 2012.

 

They argue that PG&E has consistently underestimated earthquake threats to the plant, and that PG&E has a long record of snafus at Diablo, such as replacing the steam generators and vessel heads without first conducting a necessary seismic test. PG&E, in contrast, says the plant boasts a solid safety record.

 

“Our point is, this is a pattern with them,” said Jane Swanson, with Mothers for Peace. “They keep screwing up — and this is a nuclear plant.”

A different dimension to this energy fight

But this battle has different overtones than many fights over energy sources, which often involve declarations that fossil fuels should be scrapped entirely as soon as possible because of their role in generating the greenhouse gases believed to contribute to global warming. Some defenders of Diablo Canyon say it’s their side that has the moral high ground because the plant is a crucial component of an intelligent policy to address climate change. This is from the Chronicle:

California law forbids building more nuclear plants in the state until the federal government comes up with a long-term solution for dealing with the radioactive waste. And with San Onofre closed, nuclear advocates say the state needs Diablo Canyon in order to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. Nuclear plants generate electricity without pumping carbon dioxide into the air, and unlike solar power plants and wind farms, their output doesn’t vary from one hour to the next.

 

“We really need to have a low-carbon, base load source of electricity,” said Jessica Lovering, a senior analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland think tank focused on energy and the environment. “Taking offline the last nuclear plant would be pretty detrimental to carbon emission reduction goals.”

The California Coastal Commission at some point is also likely to have some regulatory say over any relicensing of Diablo Canyon.

PG&E is believed to consider the plant to be a cornerstone of supply generation for decades to come. But as the greentechmedia account noted, the giant utility “has not yet made a decision about whether to move forward with the relicensing process” — despite building a case for an extended permit for nearly a decade.

Previously, a CalWatchdog.com story covered Carson Bruno’s research showing that the state of California has far surpassed its 2020 goal of having 33 percent of electricity coming from renewable sources. So why isn’t this big news? Because according to state laws establishing the 33 percent goal, some renewable energy doesn’t count as renewable energy.

Bruno also makes a provocative point about Gov. Jerry Brown’s goals on another energy front:

California may be the greenest state in the nation. The Golden State’s renewable portfolio standard is among the nation’s most aggressive, the state’s cap-and-trade program is likely the most developed, and each legislative session lawmakers grapple over dozens of new environmental-based bills. … So it didn’t come as any surprise that during his 4th (and final) State of the State address, Jerry Brown focused heavily on taking California’s already aggressive climate change action to the next level. …

Brown [said the state would] double the energy efficiency of California’s buildings. …

This proposal is the most straightforward, but also may be the most difficult to achieve. Here’s why: California is already the national leader – coincidentally, since Jerry Brown was first governor – in energy conservation.

Conserving more would be akin to squeezing out more lemon juice from an already squeezed lemon: you’ll get a little, but not that much. Californians use approximately the same amount of energy they did 40 years ago as the rest of the nation has increased its use by roughly half. This is despite California’s population and economic output steadily increasing. California’s Mediterranean-like climate helps reduce energy use, but that can’t explain the full difference.

Here’s where the paradox comes in, however. We know how to get to the next step: technology. Smart metering enables consumers and providers to better understand their behavior to encourage conservation; new lighting technology and new advances in heating and cooling systems better reduce waste. But even with new technology, doubling efficiency while California continues to grow and after California has already squeezed a lot out of consumers won’t be easy.

‘Build it and they will come’ regulatory approach

There’s always been an element of “build it and they will come” to California environmental regulators’ habit of establishing goals that seem unrealistic but that the private sector manages to meet. More than a few engineers were skeptical that cars averaging 35 MPG was a realistic goal, but that’s now the federal mandate for coming years, as the Obama administration follows the California example of demanding change that seems daunting. As Car & Driver wrote, “as goes California, so goes the country.”

But there are two recent examples of California regulators going too far and retreating in embarrassment. In 2010, they backed down from a proposal to criminalize having under-inflated tires after I wrote about it on my U-T San Diego blog and John & Ken took up the cause on KFI AM 640. This was the informal analysis of the proposal from the California New Car Dealers Association:

(The) regs. CARB’s pushing through (released this week and subject to a 15 day comment period) … provides that the only times that consumers may decline a check and inflate service — they can never decline the service if it’s offered for free — is when they are charged for services AND if they can PROVE (with DOCUMENTATION!) that they’ve had their tires checked and inflated in the last 30 days, or if they WILL do so within the next week. It is unclear, but possible, that CARB could take enforcement action against the consumer if they don’t follow through with their promise?!

In 2009, California regulators also backed down from a tentative proposal to ban black paint on cars after facing incredulity from U.S. and Japanese automakers. Snopes treats this as a “mostly false” story. But I spoke with an executive for an auto paint company in 2009, and she said California air board staffers were absolutely serious about the idea in meetings early that year. That’s how it was treated by an auto-industry website.

This link — http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/cool-paints/cool-paints.htm — used to show the air board’s proposal, but now it only shows an error message.

That’s the conclusion of an article in the March-April issue of Eureka, a new periodical by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The word Eureka, of course, is the state motto of California.

The article is titled “The Politics of Governor Brown’s Climate Change Proposals,” by Carson Bruno, a research fellow on California at Hoover. “In fact, in 2011, allowed renewables plus nuclear and large hydro-electric accounted for 53.1 percent of California’s in-state electricity generation, easily surpassing Brown’s new target,” he wrote.

Bruno clarified in an email to CalWatchdog.com that he only looked at in-state power generation, which included allowed renewables, nuclear and large hydro generation.

And the discrepancy with the official state tally of renewables as not even 33 percent so far is because of the state’s official definition of “allowed renewables.” According to Bruno, California does not include hydro and nuclear power as “allowed renewables” even though they are non-polluting. It also hides its reliance on “dirty” imported power from other states by categorizing it as “unspecified power.”

Bruno said that, if nuclear and hydro power are included, California exceeded the 50 percent green-power threshold in 2011 when the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant was decommissioned and a substantial amount of green solar power mainly took its place.

Moreover, adding new hydro and nuclear power would be just as clean an alternative as less steady and more expensive solar, wind or geothermal power, according to Bruno. Wind power stops on calm days; and solar power stops at dusk.

Of course, building more hydro means more dams, which is opposed by environmentalists; and more nuclear power is close to impossible after the Fukushima accident in Japan four years ago.

Electricity mix

To fact check Bruno’s numbers, CalWatchdog.com conducted its own investigation into California’s mix of electricity sources since the enactment of AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Using its authority under AB32, in 2010 the California Air Resources Board mandated 33 percent renewables by 2020.

California not only does not consider hydroelectric and nuclear power as renewable but hides that the state still partly depends on imported coal power from other states that it has re-categorized as “unspecified power.” In 2013, California got 7.82 percent of its power from coal-fired power plants and 12.49 percent from murky “unspecified power,” totaling 20.31 percent.

The California Energy Commission uses this definition: “Unspecified Sources of Power generally include spot market purchases, wholesale power marketing, purchases from pools of electricity where the original source of fuel is undetermined, and null power.”

According to the CEC, “Null power refers to power that was originally renewable power but from which the renewable energy credits have been unbundled and sold separately. Null power is not attributable to any technology or fuel type.”

Renewable Energy Credits

Renewable Energy Credits are also known as Green Tags.  Instead of trading tons of carbon, REC’s trade kilowatt-hours of wholesale electricity from untrackable sources because electrons from coal and green power are all the same.

RECs are a way for municipal power departments and new municipal Community Choice power buying cooperatives to “green wash” their purchases of imported power from outside California. It is a way of allowing imported coal power, that technically doesn’t add to California’s air pollution, to count as “green” and “clean.”

Yet entirely clean nuclear and hydropower are not considered clean.

When RECs are considered in the state green power mix for both in-state and imported power, California already nearly met or exceeded its 50 percent green power goal in 2009 (49.89 percent), 2010 (50.37 percent) and in 2011 (56.55 percent).

Conversely, when RECs are considered as fossil-fueled power instead of “greenwashed,” the proportion of California’s power from fossil fuel sources has shown no substantial reduction.

Percentage of California Power from Fossil Fuels — 2007 to 2013

In-State and Imported Power

California is meeting its current 33 percent green power goal by including solar, wind and geothermal power as green, excluding hydro and nuclear power as green, reducing nuclear power output and “greenwashing” imported coal power from other states.

Finding the above numbers buried in the CEC’s database may be a Eureka moment. But learning that California hasn’t much reduced its proportion of fossil-fueled power after spending billions of dollars on green energy validates Bruno’s conclusion that California’s green energy policy is “not about climate change, it’s about politics.”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission held a public meeting Thursday in Carlsbad, during which members discussed the process by which the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station will be decommissioned and, importantly, who will ultimately foot the projected $4 billion bill.

This past June, Southern California Edison unexpectedly announced it would permanently shutter the nuclear plant, which generated 2200 megawatts when fully operational, roughly 20 percent of the utility’s overall electricity production.

Edison took San Onofre offline in January 2012 because of problems with steam generators installed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. After trying and failing for 17 months to get regulatory approval to restart its two reactors, Edison thought it best just to abandon the plant.

NRC spokesman Victor Dricks told KGTV in San Diego that Edison has three options for mothballing San Onofre. “They can probably disassemble most of the equipment on site,” he said. “They can let time go by 10, 20, 30 years, up to 60 years. Or they can choose a third option, which is called entombment, where they basically could build a giant sarcophagus around the plant.”

Whatever option Edison chooses, the decommissioning process will be long and expensive. And while Edison, which owns 78 percent of San Onofre, will bear some of the expense itself, the utility also expects its ratepayers to shoulder some of the cost.

Costs

Indeed, in full-page newspaper advertisements published last month in the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times, Edison stated that it is “vigorously pursuing recoveries” from both Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and the utility’s insurers, “there may be costs that are not recovered” and those “could be significant.”

In that event, which appears highly likely, Edison believes that its ratepayers (as well as ratepayers for Sempra Energy, which owns roughly 20 percent of San Onofre, and the city of Riverside, which owns roughly 2 percent) should share the financial burden.

“Unlike other businesses that invest, produce and sell their products for whatever price the market will bear,” stated Edison’s newspaper advertisements, “our prices are set by our regulator, the Public Utilities Commission.”

Those prices — or rates — “allow us to recover our operating costs,” the utility explained, “without any mark-up or profit.” It also allows Edison “to recover at cost our investment in system assets, over time.”

As such, Edison has asked the PUC to raise its electricity rates $2.4 billion over seven years to partially recover the costs of San Onofre’s decommission. Meanwhile, Sempra Energy, parent of San Diego Gas & Electric, has separately sought approval of an $808 million rate increase to recover its costs.

It remains to be seen if the PUC approves the higher electricity rates sought by Edison and Sempra to defray the cost of the nuclear plant’s permanent shutdown. While the utilities may not get all they are asking for — more than $3 billion between them – they very well may get some, if not much, of it.

Or was the nuclear plant closed primarily because of excessive regulation — the latest victim of a California bureaucratic culture that prefers reflexive edicts to thoughtful decisions driven by cost-benefit analysis?

U-T San Diego business columnist Dan McSwain — one of the few newspaper business columnists I’ve ever read who actually used to be a successful businessman — makes the case quite persuasively that it was for the latter reason:

“Without question, San Onofre’s steam generators have serious technical problems. But the decision to abandon the plant was a regulatory and political calculation. It wasn’t a technical decision, not by a long shot. …

“Mitsubishi … is a global conglomerate that has installed 116 generators similar to San Onofre’s. ….

“Edison bought its steam generators as part of a 2009 retrofit. The old ones were supposed to last until 2022, but corrosion ruined too many of the generators’ thousands of narrow metal tubes.

“The tubes convert superheated water from the nuclear reactors into steam, which drives power-producing turbines.

“Mitsubishi’s retrofit plan had been used in dozens of similar plants. The plan used a more corrosion-resistant alloy, but added hundreds of tubes because the new alloy was less efficient in transferring heat.”

Fixes made around the world — but not in California

The point McSwain makes about similar equipment functioning just fine at numerous nuclear plants around the world can’t be made  enough. There were some unique problems at San Onofre, but Mitsubishi depicted them as manageable.

“After much discussion, and the addition of supports to reduce vibration in the long, narrow tubes, Edison signed off on the plan as the lead designer.

“But last year radioactive steam leaked from San Onofre’s Unit 3. The tubes were vibrating in a direction that had never been seen before, causing them to hit each other and wear catastrophically.

“At this point Edison decided to also keep Unit 2 offline until officials figured out what to do. In June, 16 months later, Edison CEO Ted Craver announced that San Onofre’s shutdown was permanent.

“Mitsubishi maintains that Unit 2 probably could have restarted and run successfully for years, because its design was slightly different and tube wear was close to normal ranges. And it says Unit 3 can be repaired in about four years.

“’We were developing a 100 percent fix,’ said Frank Gillespie, a top U.S. executive for Mitsubishi’s nuclear division.”

I don’t know about you, but I trust Mitsubishi far more than California regulators.

And if your power, or my power, goes out this year because San Onofre is no longer able to supply hundreds of thousands of homes in San Diego and Orange counties, I know who’s to blame.

California already has a man-made drought. In Socal, now we’ve got a man-made power shortage.

P.S.: Yes, movie buffs, the photo of San Onofre above is a screen grab from “The Naked Gun.”

By Laer Pearce

On Jan. 31, the strained California electricity grid marked the one year anniversary of the shutting down of Unit 3 at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. The reactor was taken off-line when pinhole leaks were discovered in water pipes that carry heated radioactive water from the reactor to a steam generator.

The process of shutting down the reactor caused a much publicized release of radioactive steam — which contained about as much radioactivity as one year’s worth of emissions from your home smoke detector. But its long-term effect is more worrisome and less publicized.

The negative impact on California’s electricity grid was made worse by the routine shut-down of San Onofre’s Unit 2 earlier in January for routine maintenance and refueling. It has been off-line ever since because it’s now under the same regulatory hold as Unit 3. (SONG’s Unit 1 was decommissioned in 1992 following 24 years of uneventful service.)

When the two reactors are on-line, they generate up to 2,200 megawatts of power — enough for 1.4 million homes and businesses. Besides supplying so much power, the power stations are critical to California’s electrified life because they provide essential voltage support. Voltage support functions like water pressure in a water system. A minimum amount of pressure is needed within the system to ensure water will move through pipes, just as a minimum amount of voltage support is necessary to ensure electrons will move through power lines.

Without sufficient voltage support, California will experience brownouts and blackouts when demand peaks. Yet last summer, with San Onofre completely off-line, we dodged brownouts. Southern California Edison, which co-owns the plant with San Diego Gas & Electric and the city of Riverside, attributes that to the lucky alignment of four factors:

* New transmission lines switched on in 2012, so more power could be brought in from elsewhere;

* Different places in the service area had hot spells at different times;

* Edison was able to buy power from AES’ 900 megawatt natural gas-fired power plant in Huntington Beach;

* People conserved.

This year, only the fourth factor remains certain. Businesses and individuals will conserve power when it’s needed, especially since many have traded 100 percent reliability for lower rates.  But no new transmission lines will come on-line this year, and last year’s Southern California weather, which saw hot spots migrating from location to location instead of covering the entire region, was unusual and not likely to be repeated.

AES Plant

What about the AES generating plant in Huntington Beach?  It’s still there and the natural gas pipeline is still connected to its boilers. So why is it that we won’t be able to get even a single kilowatt of power from it when we’ll need it this summer? The answer can be found in California’s fixation on single-handedly saving the planet from the ravages of global warming.

One keystone to that quixotic quest is California’s first-in-the-nation state-run cap and trade program, which kicked off last November with the state’s first carbon credit auction.  AES decided to sell the plant’s carbon credits at the auction, and because it did, no greenhouse gases can be emitted from its stacks this year.  As far as California’s electricity grid is concerned, the plant might as well have been wiped out by a tsunami.

Could it really be that a slip of paper from a harebrained and costly auction — an auction that will not accomplish one whit of planet-saving — may result in brownouts and blackouts this summer? The answer to that question, unfortunately but not at all unexpectedly, is yes.

With long-time environmentalist Gov. Jerry Brown at California’s helm, green-leaning Democrat super-majorities in both houses of the state legislature and entrenched eco-crats ruling the state’s regulatory agencies, the AES plant is certain to remain shuttered no matter what the summer may bring. The carbon crusaders simply cannot afford to allow a high-profile precedent to undercut the centerpiece of their carbon-fighting battle so early in the auction’s history.

So, should brownouts and blackouts return to California this summer, remember this: It wasn’t really problems at the San Onofre nuclear power plant that caused them. It was problems in the thinking of California’s leadership.

Laer Pearce, a veteran of three decades of California public affairs, is the author of “Crazifornia: Tales from the Tarnished State.”

By Joseph Perkins

With San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station offline since January, Southern California Edison, the plant’s majority owner, launched an energy conservation campaign this week urging its customers to save power this summer.

San Onofre’s two reactors, out of service because of issues with recently installed steam generators, produces a combined a 2,200 megawatts, which accounts for nearly 20 percent of SoCal Ed’s total electricity production.

If residents of the estimated 1.4 million homes powered by San Onofre do not conserve as much electricity as SoCal Ed hopes, there is a very real prospects of brownouts, or even blackouts, this summer.

That’s because the next several months are expected to be “considerably warmer than average,” according to Tom Dunklee, a meteorologist with the California Independent System Operator, which oversees much of the state’s energy grid. That will put upward pressure on electricity demand.

Against that backdrop, the environmental group “Friends of the Earth” has launched a campaign of its own to permanently shutdown San Onofre’s two reactors, which, the anti-nuke activists claim, “pose a unique threat to eight million Californians living within 50 miles” of the plant.

Hearing demand

Two weeks ago, Friends of the Earth filed a petition with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission demanding that SoCal Ed obtain a license amendment before San Onofre restarts its two reactors. The petition also seeks an “adjudicatory public hearing,” which would amount to a trial at which SoCal Ed would have to plead for San Onofre’s continued operation.

If, somehow, the environmental group succeeded in shutting down the nuclear plant, SoCal Ed would have to replace the electrons San Onofre generates. The anti-nuke activists suggest that would be no problem, as the utility, along with the San Onofre’s co-owners, San Diego Gas & Electric and the city ofRiverside, have made do the past five months with no disruption of service to their customers.

But that’s because SoCal Ed and its partners made certain contingency arrangements anticipating San Onofre’s temporary shutdown, obtaining replacement electricity from other sources. But they cannot easily replace the nuclear plant’s 2,200 megawatts over an extended period of time.

Friends of the Earth’s suggestion is that the nuclear-generated electricity be replaced by electricity generated by renewable energy. But even if SoCal Ed  wanted to do so – and the utility does, in fact, invest in solar, wind and hydro power – it simply could not make up San Onofre’s output anytime soon.

Indeed, SoCal Ed estimates it would take 64,000 acres of solar panels to replace the electricity San Onofre generates on its 84-acre site inSan Clemente. Or it would take 59,000 acres of wind turbines.

Given the opposition environmental groups have to even modest-sized solar and wind projects here in the Golden State, not to mention hydro projects, it is unrealistic to expect those renewable energy sources to replace nuclear power.

That may explain why 71 percent of those located in SoCal Ed’s service territory support nuclear power. They recognize that it remains an essential contributor to the state’s energy mix.