By Ari Burack<\/strong><\/p>\n June 25, 2008<\/p>\n San Francisco supervisors Tuesday approved a resolution urging the city to further explore energy transmission options from outside the city in order to close an aging, heavily polluting power plant in the city’s southeastern Potrero district.<\/p>\n For years city officials have been seeking a way to close the plant, owned by Mirant Corp., which residents blame for environmental degradation and higher incidences of health problems. The city was able to close a similar power plant in the neighboring Bayview district in 2006.<\/p>\n The resolution calls on the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the City Attorney to submit a “transmission-only” proposal to the California Independent System Operator, the regulatory agency that oversees the state’s electrical grid.<\/p>\n Cal-ISO has maintained the only way to close the Mirant plant and maintain the reliability of the grid would be to upgrade the plant with cleaner-burning combustion turbines known as “peakers,” designed to be able to run only during hours of peak energy need.<\/p>\n However, some supervisors argued a recent letter from Cal-ISO President Yakout Mansour to Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is seeking to instead retrofit the Mirant plant, appeared to allow for the possibility of a transmission-only alternative, including the planned Trans-Bay Cable, expected to deliver 400 megawatts of electricity to the city from Pittsburg.<\/p>\n Supervisors have also scheduled a July 15 vote to revisit the combustion turbine proposal, estimated to cost between $250 and $270 million, while Newsom has pledged to submit new legislation on his retrofit plan.<\/p>\n A requirement that would have set minimum environmental and economic criteria for any potential in-city power generation project to replace the plant was stricken from today’s resolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Ari Burack June 25, 2008 San Francisco supervisors Tuesday approved a resolution urging the city to further explore energy transmission options from outside the city in order to close an aging, heavily polluting power…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6413,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222],"tags":[994],"class_list":["post-609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-mirant"],"yoast_head":"\n