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©2002 Cascadia Times

A Grand Plan

Calpine burnishes a green image on its way to the top

TURNER, Ore. - This little farming community in the Willamette Valley has become one more dot on an increasingly crowded map of places targeted for new power plants.

Calpine Corporation, a San Jose-based company with designs on being the biggest energy producer in North America, has come to Turner with plans to build a 620-megawatt facility at the south edge of town. Though Calpine is hardly a household name, some experts are concerned that Calpine may become big enough to exert influence over the electricity market. Calpine launched the largest power development program in North America in February when it said it would develop 70,000 megawatts of electric generating capacity by the year 2005. "It will be the cleanest and most modern electric generating fleet in the country," Calpine chief executive officer Peter Cartwright said in the statement. Calpine plans to build 10 of its new plants in the Northwest.

At a town meeting here recently, Calpine officials touted their plant as an environmentally friendly solution to energy shortages. A spokeswoman said the plant’s emissions of carbon dioxide - a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming - will by “offset” by investments in green projects. She also said its emissions of dangerous nitrous oxides and other pollutants “frankly are so low we’ll have a hard time measuring them.”

While such claims may burnish the company’s “green” image, and possibly defuse local opposition, neither is quite accurate. In fact:

At best, only about 8 percent of Calpine’s global-warming emissions at the Turner plant would be offset; the company spokeswoman didn’t disclose to folks at the meeting that the remaining 92 percent - about 2 million tons per year - will still wreak havoc with the global climate. Calpine’s 10 Northwest plants, if built, would produce nearly 18 million tons of Co2 per year, according to the Bonneville Power Administration. Total CO2 emissions from all of Calpine’s existing and proposed plants could approach 300 million tons per year (based on the BPA’s factor of slightly more than 4,000 tons of CO2 per megawatt).

Each plant will produce emissions of nitrous oxides, volatile organic compounds, ammonia and soot that are indeed measurable. Citizens groups in Turner, San Jose, Calif., and elsewhere have expressed strong health concerns over these emissions, some of which can cause cancer.

It’s Calpine’s taxes, however, that may be too low to measure. The company has asked for an exemption from paying property taxes for five years or more. Calpine may further reduce costs by as much as $10 million by hiring non-union labor, a typical company practice, according to labor experts. Not that business is bad - earnings for the first six months of 2001 increased by 400 percent over the same period last year. Some of those gains may have been ill-gotten, and may have helped contribute to the energy crisis throughout the West with impacts ranging from blackouts in California to dead salmon in the Columbia River. The California grid operator has identified Calpine as one of many energy merchants to have “bilked” the state out of $8.9 billion in wholesale electricity overcharges. Of that, the state claims Calpine owes $236 million. Calpine is negotiating a settlement, though it says the state’s claim is too high.

Whether Turner residents will support Calpine’s bid here remains to be seen, though they wouldn’t be the first to reject this particular proposal. Officials in nearby Woodburn and Salem spurned Calpine when it previously asked for permission to build the same project in those communities.

But Calpine has come to expect local resistance where it proposes big power plants. The company recently obtained permits to build a new natural gas-fired power plant in the San Jose, Calif., area, overcoming concerns from local citizen groups, Cisco Systems, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) about air pollution impacts. This plant is about the same size - 600 megawatts, enough to serve 600,000 homes - as the Turner proposal.

“The 186 tons of nitrogen oxide (NOx) that the proposed plant would emit into our neighborhood's air per year is unacceptable for a residential area,” said one local group, the Santa Teresa Citizen Action Group. “The fact that we already emit many tons of nitrogen oxide into the air throughout the County, mostly from cars, is exactly why we don't need any more.” The plant would a total of 1,234 tons per year of pollution, including NOx, carbon monoxide, tiny particulate matter, ammonia, and organic compounds.

Environmentalists remain divided over the project, which has been endorsed by both the Sierra Club (the plant manager is a Sierra Club member) and the Natural Resources Defense Council. In an advertisement published in California newspapers, the Sierra Club said its support for the plant was evidence it did not oppose all new power developments. Both groups like new gas-fired plants because they supposedly will replace older, dirtier coal and gas plants in California and elsewhere, resulting in cleaner air and reduced CO2 emissions. Perhaps so, but the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that the nation’s coal- and gas-fired plants will be increasing output over the next 20 years, a prospect that could yield ever more pollution and climate change.

The Sierra Club officially does not oppose the Turner plant, although some club members have expressed strong personal opposition. Calpine has made other inroads into the Northwest environmental community as well. A company official is on the board of Renewable Northwest Project, a Portland-based group.

There are lingering concerns that the San Jose plant may have been an environmental mistake. In a September 12, 2001, letter to the California Energy Commission, PEER said the project apparently was approved only because the commission’s staff was under “enormous pressure” to get behind it. Important questions about air quality, PEER claims, were ignored, possibly in violation of the California Air Quality Act (CEQA). The commission has denied the allegation.

Karen Schambach, PEER’s California Coordinator, said staff members told her that in some instances, findings were changed over the objections of the analysts. In other cases, analysts who failed to change their findings to reflect more favorably on an impact were removed from the project.

“The need for additional power should not supercede the laws that have allowed California to balance a booming economy with environmental protection,” Schambach said in the letter. “Most of the staff with whom I spoke feared for their jobs and careers if their managers thought they had discussed these pressures, but they also believe very strongly that a public trust is being violated, and are distressed by what they see as a perversion of the CEQA process.”