Power Plant Updates

Faculty Association March Newsletter

I. Diane Zuliani:

Susan Sperling and Diane Zuliani hosted a well-attended Flex Day session on the two power plants planned for the Chabot neighborhood. The session’s thirty attendees heard an overview of the two proposals, a brief summary of their possible health impacts, and a discussion of the environmental justice questions raised by having two plants sited in one low-income, majority minority neighborhood. A summary of the day’s discussion, with a few new updates, follows:

The first of the two plants, the Russell City Energy Center, is a 600 megawatt, natural gas fired plant proposed by San Jose-based Calpine. The facility is to be built at the end of Depot Road, next to the water treatment plant, on the edge of the Bay. It will consist of two one-hundred forty-five foot towers (fourteen and a-half stories), and be powered by a combined-cycle system, which will recirculate some of the plant’s hot exhaust. The Russell City Energy Center is NOT intended to supply the local Hayward area with electricity. The energy it generates will be cabled across the bay to service the Peninsula. The pollutants emitted by the plant, however, will be borne locally.

The toxins emitted by the Russell City Energy Center will be numerous, and will include five of the six “criteria pollutants” identified by the Environmental Protection Agency as “capable of injuring health, harming the environment and causing property damage.” According to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), the Russell City Energy Center will emit these criteria pollutants into the atmosphere in the following amounts annually:

Nitrogen oxides 134 tons

Carbon monoxide 389 tons

Precursor volatile organic compounds 28.5 tons

Sulfur dioxide 12 tons

Airborne particulate matter 86 tons

These amounts exceed what regulators consider acceptable. To “mitigate” the deleterious effects of these pollutants, the BAAQMD and California Energy Commission will require that Calpine purchase “pollution credits.” Pollution credits are the amount of pollutants that a given industrial firm, utility, or state can emit within a given year. If a firm produces less than it’s allotted quota, then it can sell their extra pollutants to other companies as “credits”; thus Calpine will have to purchase such credits in order to be allowed to pollute the East Bay atmosphere. It is not entirely clear, but Calpine may also be required to offer a cash incentive for local residents to convert their wood-burning fireplaces to gas in order to reduce particulates (thereby allowing Calpine the right to emit those particulates itself).

Two California Energy Commission (CEC) Commissioners (Byron & Geesman), approved the Russell City Energy Center last Fall, despite their own staff’s rejection of it, on the basis of its potential to endanger air traffic using the Hayward Airport (off Winton). While many have taken the CEC’s approval to be final, others continue to fight the plant’s encroachment, and there are a couple of legal challenges in the works. Most significantly, perhaps, is a lawsuit against the BAAQMD, filed by the head of a local group called “Keep Hayward Green and Clean,” which contends that, although it was legally obliged to do so, the BAAQMD failed to notify the County of Alameda of the siting of this plant on County-owned land. Supervisor Gail Steele (District 2) has signed an affidavit to this effect, stating that the County never received notice from BAAQMD. According to the lawsuit, the failure to notify Alameda County was not only a legal breach in and of itself; it prevented the County from informing its many constituents (including Chabot) in time for those constituents to exercise their legal rights in the siting process. This explains, the case contents, why there is only one lone public comment on record for Russell City. Calpine and the CEC maintain this is merely evidence of the lack of concern on the part of the County. This lawsuit says otherwise, and the hundreds of public comments on record for the second plant provide ample evidence that the County is indeed concerned about power plants. Should this legal challenge be upheld in court, it could cause a delay in Calpine’s plans, or, more drastically, require them to begin the approval process over again. If the case is denied, Calpine is permitted to begin construction this August.

The second of the two plants, the Eastshore Energy Center, is a project of Texas-based Tierra Energy. It is a 115-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant planned for the intersection of Depot Road and Clawiter, in a largely residential area approximately a half mile from campus. If approved, the plant will be comprised of fourteen seventy-foot high towers (seven stories), and will utilize fourteen huge internal combustion engines with catalytic-converter-type attachments. As with the Russell City Energy Center, the Eastshore Energy Center will emit the same five “criteria pollutants” in the following amounts annually:

Nitrogen oxide 54 tons

Carbon monoxide 84 tons

Precursor volatile organic compounds 84 tons

Sulfur dioxide 6 tons

Airborne particulate matter 64 tons

As with Calpine, Tierra Energy will be required to purchase pollution credits and pursue the fireplace retrofit option. And also like Russell City, the Eastshore Energy Center was rejected by the staff of the CEC. Tierra Energy, however, has asked the CEC to “override” the staff’s rejection.

If both plants are approved, the combined annual emissions of the two plants are expected to be:

Nitrogen oxides 188 tons

Carbon monoxide 473 tons

Precursor volatile organic compounds 112.5 tons

Sulfur dioxide 18 tons

Airborne particulate matter 150 tons

Significantly—and frighteningly—a CEC map (see attached) indicates that the zone of maximum cumulative impact of the emissions from the two plants (based on the height of the towers and prevailing wind patterns) happens to be Chabot College itself, and most specifically, our athletic fields. In other words, those who stand to be most affected by the siting of these two plants are Chabot employees and our students. The daily presence of small children in our Early Childhood Development Center is particularly worrisome.

Final hearings for Eastshore took place in December and January, with impressive representation from the Chabot community in the form of written testimony submitted by Carolyn Arnold, Rachel Ugale, and Susan Sperling, and public comments made by Chancellor Kinnamon, Trustee Gin, Diane Zuliani, Catherine Powell, Jove Meyer (ASCC) and others. The most powerful effort taken on Chabot’s behalf came from Sue Sperling, who kept her cool while undergoing a hostile and grueling cross-examination of her testimony by the lawyers for Tierra Energy.

The Eastshore Energy Center is still awaiting a final decision by the CEC. If the decision is in favor of the plant, Tierra Energy is hoping to begin construction of the Eastshore Energy Center in the “latter months” of this year.

II. Susan Sperling:

The Faculty Association Executive Board voted unanimously last semester to file a Petition to intervene in the siting of the proposed Eastshore Power Plant near the border of the Chabot Campus. In this action we joined the District, the County of Alameda, the City of Hayward, and a number of other community and professional groups deeply concerned about potential health, safety, ecological and environmental justice impacts of the proposed power plants on our communities. As Diane Zuliani notes above (and in her eloquent, riveting comments to the California Energy Commission), there is much reason to worry about the levels of emissions discharged by the proposed Eastshore plant, especially in terms of the synergistic effects in an area where another, larger plant is scheduled to be built, and which is already polluted by gasoline and diesel fuel along a heavily trafficked corridor near the campus. We are proud to have a Faculty Senate Prexy who has taken a pivotal and crucial role in educating us about the plants.

As a Faculty Association, it is part of our charge to address workplace health and safety matters, and this situation certainly poses a number of such issues for faculty. As educators we also care about the health and safety of those we teach and our colleagues in non-teaching roles on the campus. There are possible negative effects on college enrollment (and therefore to the overall economic health of Chabot) of students choosing to go elsewhere once the environmental air quality hazards of both plants become manifest, should they be built. As faculty and citizens of our communities we also care about the restoration and maintenance of wetlands in our neighborhood as well as issues of environmental justice and health.

Because we are one of the most ethnically diverse community colleges in California, serving a great number of immigrant and working class students, we have a special responsibility to speak out on environmental justice. As Carolyn Arnold’s statistics at the California Energy Commission hearings in December point out, we are “an Environmental Justice Population” according to the Energy Commission’s own criteria. By statute, the Energy Commission is obligated to take into consideration the special vulnerabilities of such communities at risk because they include many people with multiple stressors in their lives. Yet Commission staff denied in their Final Staff report on Eastshore that there were either public health issues or environmental justice concerns. In our testimony as Interveners, the Association and District, as well as the County requested that the Commission take a closer look at these issues, including rates of respiratory disorders such as asthma in our communities, lack of access to health care among some community members, and the synergistic effects on our communities of multiple stressors in the social and physical environment. We await the California Energy Commission’s response to our Petitions to Intervene, which should come over the next months.

Meanwhile, we plan to continue working on this matter through educating, organizing and, potentially, future litigation. The Chabot Power Plants Task Force will meet this month (March 20 at College Hour) to discuss the next steps. All are encouraged to attend. We will be rolling up our sleeves and getting started on a number of excellent initiatives presented by attendees at the Flex Day presentation on the Plants. Watch for the Task Force announcement on Groupwise and across the Campus. See you there!