Ending Fish Kills at Bay Area Power Plants
Supreme Court Sides with Power Plants that Use Once-Through Cooling
In April 2009, the Supreme Court has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency may weigh industry costs versus marine life protections when regulating power plants that use once-through cooling, an antiquated technology that kills fish and other marine animals. Baykeeper has been fighting the use of once-through cooling at three power plants in the Bay Area for several years.
What is Once Through Cooling?
Once-through cooling is a process that pulls in cold sea and bay water to cool power plant turbines and then releases the heated water back into the environment. Every day, 16 billion gallons of marine waters are sucked into California’s power plants, killing nearly everything that passes through the plants’ machinery. Larvae and small fish get pulled into the plant and die in the turbines (“impingement”), while larger fish and marine mammals get trapped on the intake screens by the force of the rushing water (“entrainment”). 79 billion fish and other marine animals are killed every year in California waters by once-through cooling.
Once Through Cooling Threatens the Bay and Delta
The Mirant Delta corporation operates three once-through cooling plants on the Bay, in San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Antioch. Although the three Bay plants are “peaker plants” – meaning they provide energy only during the periods of highest consumption – the plants’ cooling systems operate year-round and consistently impact San Francisco Bay. The intake process, which causes the impingement and entrainment of marine animals, can kill organisms from all levels of the food chain and disrupt the normal processes of the Bay’s ecosystem. Additionally, the plants release heated water that can reach temperatures as high as 100 degrees. The Bay’s normal temperature rarely goes above 70 degrees, so a sudden influx of hot water can disrupt the Bay’s delicate ecosystem and the animals living in it.
Ending the Use of Once Through Cooling
Baykeeper is part of a coalition of environmental and fishing groups that is aggressively fighting the continued use of once-through cooling. We’re supporting a bill in the California Legislature that would force inefficient coastal power plants – including all three of the plants along the San Francisco Bay shoreline – to switch to less environmentally damaging cooling systems by the year 2015. The bill, authored by Senator Ellen Corbett (D-San Leandro), would also require the State Water Board to create a timeline that completely phases out the use of once-through cooling at California power plants. This bill is critical to protecting California’s marine ecosystems, but there is opposition from the energy industry, which has been reluctant to take responsibility for the environmental costs of their operations.
The Supreme Court Ruling
The use of once-through cooling has sparked a legal battle that has gone all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Baykeeper’s ally Hudson Riverkeeper sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency when the agency proposed that economic concerns of the energy industry outweigh the protection of marine life when considering alternatives to once-through cooling. The Supreme Court ruled that EPA could weigh industry costs when establishing environmental protections for power plants with cooling water intake structures. The Court’s ruling states that a cost-benefit analysis is not categorically forbidden by the Clean Water Act, leaving it to the new Obama Administration to decide whether and how to compare costs to benefits when it issues new regulations for existing power plants.
In the meantime, San Francisco Baykeeper and our partners and allies will do all we can to tell California’s policy-makers how important it is to phase out once-through cooling.