Having Coffee with the Man of Power

Eric Pendergraft and I have already been using Redondo Beach Patch.com to engage in a good conversation about the AES power plant in town after I wrote a column a few weeks back. I asked him to turn the Harbor Drive facility into a utility scale solar power plant, and he then thoughtfully replied with his own column explaining why that wasn't possible.

I really appreciated the approach he took and the fact that he didn't get hung up on either protocol -- as the President of AES Southland he certainly could have easily ignored me -- or on the fact that I had disparaging things to say about the look of the power plant and its carbon footprint. 

Last week, he took me up on my offer to buy him a cup of coffee at the location of his choice, and we met for a face-to-face conversation at Catalina Coffee Company. 

Eric Pendergraft is young, good-looking, easy-going and well spoken. It wasn't hard to spend an hour talking with him about one subject of mutual interest after another. We disagreed on some issues but not with a disagreeable tone or attitude.

I started by thanking him for meeting with me and complimented him on not bringing a public relations person along to act as filter, and he said the company doesn't have one. He made it clear he was speaking for himself, but during our conversation he didn't contradict any AES company policy or positions.

One thing we didn't disagree about was the need to cut CO2 emissions and greenhouse gases. He talked about his strong support for California's renewable portfolio standards, which is supposed to see us reach 20 percent of our energy generated by renewables this year and 33 percent renewables by 2020. He doesn't have the sense of urgency I do about it, but he's enthusiastic about meeting the goal.

Eric is proud of the role that the AES Redondo Beach plant will playafter its modernization in facilitating the increasing use of renewable power. It already supplies power to Southen California Edison that helps the utility meet peak energy load needs that overwhelm the grid with demand. 

I agreed that my proposal to convert his Redondo plant to solar wasn't practical enough with only 52 acres available. That only allows for 6.5 megawatts of power and that's only enough for 5,525 homes. Compare that to the 1,300 megawatts of "clean" natural gas power which provides enough energy for more than a million homes. 

I told Eric how impressed I was with the power of marketing, especially the natural gas industry's incredible use of the term "clean" natural gas. Or as they like to call it, CNG, "clean natural gas," like it's almost one word.

Natural gas is not of course clean. It's a fossil fuel that pollutes when it's burned and contaminates drinking water all across the country where "fracking" is used to drill for it, as the documentary Gasland demonstrated. Burning natural gas emits CO2 and other greenhouse gases that are overheating our atmosphere and wrecking our climate. It is in fact another dirty fuel, but it's only half as dirty as coal, so that's what makes it "clean," see? 

The industry likes to put it differently. They say it has 50 percent less harmful emissions than coal and that's what makes it clean. It's brilliant word play, and it's no wonder the coal industry has been pushing so hard to add the word "clean" in front of their product.

Eric Pendergraft didn't take any offense or argue with me about the marketing brilliance of the natural gas industry. He just pointed out how important natural gas is for the transition to renewable energy. And I didn't debate that point with him.

Speaking about renewable energy, natural gas power plants, like a modernized AES Redondo, are also considered bridge plants that fill in the gaps for solar and wind energy when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

But we wouldn't need to keep burning fossil fuels anymore if we could "inventory" or store the solar and wind energy for later use. Eric and I talked about this concept and I mentioned vehicle-to-grid electric car charging and storing energy via the plug-in vehicle batteries. I also brought up gravel/heat-pump energy storage, which Eric hadn't heard of, and I promised to follow-up with some information on it later. Eric told me about the energy storage test I didn't know AES was doing with 20 MW of advanced lithium-ion battery storage at their NY facility.

I enjoyed talking with him and asked if we could keep in touch. He said he'd like that and I know I would, too.

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