NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:Fate of the AES power plant hangs in the balance

Yet another environmental controversy is in the offing for Huntington Beach. This time it’s about the AES power plant. Here’s what might happen.

One possibility is that the plant may have to close down completely. Another is that the plant may have to change the nature of its massive cooling system. A third possibility is that the plant may have to pay millions of dollars to restore local wetlands.

These possibilities were discussed last Thursday evening at a public meeting in the power plant’s conference room. The discussion drew a standing-room-only crowd of neighbors, environmental activists, agency regulators and AES employees.

A recent change in federal regulations requires all coastal power plants to reduce the amount of marine life they kill by as much as 95%. Yes, coastal power plants kill marine life. Power plants make electricity by boiling water into steam that turns turbines. The heat that is generated then has to be dissipated by some system equivalent to the radiator of your car. The cooling system is the problem. Power plants along the coast, like our AES plant, are water-cooled. They draw in enormous volumes of cold water from the ocean and use it to draw away the excess heat. How much water? At peak operation, up to 350,000 gallons per minute. In the process, fish and other marine life are sucked in and killed. New regulations require these plants to do more extensive mitigation of the damage that they do.

One way to mitigate that damage is to compensate for it by promoting growth of marine life elsewhere. One way power plants have done that in the past is to pay for wetland restoration. In fact, our own AES plant just contributed more than $5 million toward the restoration of the Huntington Beach wetlands. That contribution, however, counted toward only two of the company’s four generators.

Under the new requirements, AES will have to do even more mitigation, this time for all four generators. Mitigation by restoration is considered the least expensive alternative, and so it is likely to be the alternative that AES will prefer.

Environmentalists on the East Coast, however, mounted a legal challenge in federal court. They don’t want mitigation by restoration; they want reduction of fish loss. The court has yet to render its decision, but the outcome of the case could be announced soon. Joe Geever, regional manager for the Surfrider Foundation, is confident that the plaintiffs will prevail, meaning that mitigation restoration will no longer be an option for the power industry.

If that option is removed from the table, what else could AES do? The most obvious solution is to put up some sort of mesh screening to keep fish out of the pipe that leads to the power plant. However, the only system that can do that has only been used in freshwater situations and even scientists working for AES were not optimistic about it being strong enough to withstand ocean storms. Also, these screening options would not prevent destruction of plankton, which is how marine invertebrates and fish start out.

Another option would be a screening device in the piping system close to the power plant where wave action would not be a factor. The experts didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the prospects for this alternative either.

One other, but rather expensive, alternative would be to scuttle the seawater cooling system altogether and replace it with what they call closed-cycle cooling. This is the alternative that is preferred by environmentalists since no ocean water would be drawn in at all.

There is one other alternative, and I’m sure there are folks in Huntington Beach who would line up to endorse it. That would be for the AES plant to close down completely. I’ve heard people voice this preference many times over the years, and just as many times I have heard that the Huntington Beach plant is considered a bulwark of the regional power grid.

The Regional Water Quality Control Board has posted documents about this issue on its website: www.waterboards.ca.gov/santaana/ html/aes.html. I counted 16 documents, many of them hundreds of pages long. No, I haven’t read them all — yet.

Among all the remarkable statistics about the power plant — the huge numbers of this and awesome amounts of that — the one that stands out for me is remarkable for being so small, in part because the power plant long ago installed a cap that deters many fish from being sucked into the intake pipe. The actual amount of fish killed by the plant is estimated at eight pounds per day. Only eight pounds — the weight of one good-sized fish. What I’ll want to see are the numbers for other marine organisms besides fish that are affected.

The meeting at AES last week was the first of four meetings that will be conducted over the year as AES studies its mitigation alternatives.