Salt and power
The area where the AES plant now sits has seen many man-made developments come and go.
First, there was a village by a seaside lake. It was a salt lake, and native peoples came from throughout the region to gather from its pools, creating busy trade for the Chowigna lodge of the Gabrielino tribe that lived by its shores.
It didn’t take long after the first Spanish expedition through the area, in 1769, for the natives to lose this particular lease on life. The expedition, which failed in its mission to find Monterey Bay, included 62 soldados de cuero – soldiers of leather, so-called because of the sweaty leather coverings they wore from head to toe. One of those soldiers, Juan Jose Dominguez, was awarded a land grant, called Rancho San Pedro, which included the salt lake (the salt was an entirely different combination of salts than the ocean, just three hundred yards away, making it a geological abnormality and a riddle that still hasn’t been answered). In 1854, Dominguez’s heirs sold the site, now called Las Salinas, to Henry Allanson and William Johnson for $500, and the businessmen founded the Pacific Salt Works Company. It quickly went bankrupt. The swampy area was deemed essentially worthless and in 1897 a steam plant was built around the lake to produce electricity for street lighting.
In 1907, the Pacific Light and Power Company, the predecessor of the Edison Company, built a new steam plant that was the largest ever built at the time. The energy produced was used to operate electric railways in L.A. and neighboring towns. Edison bought the plant in 1917 as a standby facility but in 1924 went back to full power during a major drought before the plant was abandoned and dismantled in 1935. Because of the demand for energy during WWII, the lake was drained and replaced with artificial fill and a new $38 million plant was built. By 1948, the new station was the largest in the West.
“What’s interesting is all of the sites where Edison built their plants… were all sensitive environmental areas,” said Peter Brand, the executive director of the California Coastal Conservancy, the state agency which has worked with the South Bay Parkland Conservancy to envision possible wetland restoration. “They took the cheapest land they could find and dumped a power plant right in the middle of it. Instead of buying farm land, they put it in wet lands and there was no regulation to stop them at the time. We’re all trying to make up for that.”
The demand for electricity grew, and more units were added; in 1957 and in 1967 the final two units were added. The electricity generating capacity of the Redondo plant had surpassed that of the Hoover Dam. After energy deregulation, the plant was sold in 1997 to AES Corp, which now owns 132 power plants worldwide.
The notion of removing or at least downsizing the power plant as a means of rejuvenating the Redondo Beach waterfront first arose at this time. Former mayor Greg Hill helped broker an agreement with AES in which the power plant would eventually give way to a residential neighborhood, accompanied by a new seaside commercial district that together was known as “The Heart of the City” project. The key to the roughly billion dollar project, however, was zoning that allowed as many as 2,998 residential units in the area. A citizen’s movement, concerned largely with the traffic impacts of the proposed development, started an initiative movement against the Heart plan and gathered 9,000 signatures in a matter of weeks, forcing the City Council in 2002 to rescind the plan.The last decade has been spent in political battle over the future of the Redondo Beach waterfront. Many of the players are the same. Light and Brand first became politically involved during the Heart of the City fight (led by Chris Cagle, who later became a councilman and tried to find compromise, parting ways with his more hardline activist allies). Councilman Aspel approved of the Heart plan as a planning commissioner, and Mayor Gin did so as council member.The city conducted a two year consensus process that culminated in 2005 with a citywide advisory vote and arguably ended with a more starkly divided community. Brand and Light backed the “Heart Park” option, which called the entire area to be converted to parkland and soundly defeated the opposing “Village Plan” option calling for a combination park, hotel, and 350 single-family homes.
The advisory vote was only that, however – it compelled no action to create a park. The issues surrounding the power plant and the future of the harbor area have remained a quagmire for a full decade, consuming untold hours and dollars with no clear outcome in sight. The city at one point attempted to collect $72 million in back taxes from AES, unsuccessfully, a matter that ended in ugly, drawn-out litigation. Building a Better Redondo later sued the city, successfully, forcing a citywide public vote on harbor zoning changes – a vote in which the city triumphed over BBR yet still had to pay $313,000 in legal costs.
Now, new state regulations requiring AES to decommission their “once-through” cooling system – that is, no longer allowing ocean water flow as the primary way to cool down turbines – has created a window of change for the power plant and possibly the larger community. AES is in the process of developing plans to upgrade and repower the existing plant and invest $500 million to clear and remediate 38 acres for potential community use.
“We want to go through a more collaborative and consensus building process with the community,” Pendergraft said. “Our vision is a quieter, smaller, cleaner power plant, but we are only going to build that if it is needed.”
AES will submit plans to the California Energy Commission next month. The commission has the ultimate say on whether AES can repower, a decision based both on the projected needs of the larger energy grid and on the merits of the individual project itself.
Light said the initiative against the power plant is intended to send a message to CEC, which is unlikely to approve the repowering of plant in a community that clearly opposes its presence. In this way, lacking a permit to repower, AES would be forced to negotiate its way out of Redondo Beach.
“It’s what the initiative is really engineered to do,” Light said.
A decision by the commission will take from one to five years; AES, if it does repower, hopes to begin a ten-year construction project by 2015. The proposed new plant would be downsized to 12 acres, replacing the five current 219-ft stacks with three 140-ft. stacks.
Hence the urgency of the anti-power plant activists, who over the course a dozen City Council meetings devoted to the topic this year urged the city to take a position against the plant.
It was a bridge the majority of the council refused to cross.
“The hardest thing to do here is to really engage and find a solution,” said Councilman Steve Diels during a meeting in April. “Talk is cheap, and to indicate we are taking a position is a cheap and easy way out – it’s not the hardest thing to do. The hardest thing to do is try to find a real solution for this community.”
