Dirty PG&E Power plant gets initial thumbs down

A subcommittee has recommended the state’s energy commission reject a request by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. that would have give the company more time to build a power plant just west of San Joaquin County.

If the energy commission at its Sept. 23 meeting also rejects the request, it likely kills a project that activist and Tracy shoe store owner Bob Sarvey argued would have given nearly all the financial benefits to Alameda County, while sticking Tracy and San Joaquin County with virtually all of the air pollution.

Sarvey, energy commission staff and a consumer group called The Utility Reform Network all opposed the extension.

PG&E on Sept. 23 will try to convince the energy commission to extend the deadline, said PG&E spokesman Blair Jones.

PG&E agreed to buy the Tesla Power Project in July 2008 from Midway Power LLC, a subsidiary of Florida Power and Light that had applied in 2001 to build a 1,120-megawatt plant just across the Alameda County border west of Tracy and Mountain House. PG&E wanted to shrink it to a 560-megawatt power plant. (One megawatt can power 750 homes.)

In April of this year, PG&E asked for a five-year extension of the construction deadline, which was scheduled to end in July before the commission gave the company until Tuesday to argue for an extension.

But the commission decided against PG&E’s request for several reasons, one of which was that the smaller power plant proposed by the company was not what the commission agreed to back in 2004.

The commission also noted that the public utility failed to diligently begin to build the plant once it bought the rights to it, and it waited until April 2009 to ask for an extension though it knew in 2008 that the deadline loomed.

In its ruling, the subcommittee noted Sarvey’s contention that, on the one hand, PG&E wanted to extend the deadline to build the plant, yet on the other hand, it asked permission to have customers pay $4.9 million in “abandoned project costs.”

Sarvey speculated that PG&E might try to pass onto ratepayers the expense of buying the rights to the plant in the first place.

“If PG&E makes a bad business decision, the shareholders should pay for that, not the ratepayers,” he said.

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