AES Delays Filing Application to Repower

AES Southland, the parent company of the AES Redondo Beach power plant, will delay submitting its application to repower the aging plant on Harbor Drive to the California Energy Commission, a representative told Patch in an email Wednesday.

"During the past few weeks, AES has been making modifications to improve our plant's design, which has led us to delay our application filing," representative Clarissa Cordova said in an email. "We now plan to submit our application to the California Energy Commission in early November.

"We are proud of the improvements and we look forward to sharing the details once they are finalized."

The "improvements" involve enclosing the majority of the plant—with the exception of the stacks—within a building, Cordova confirmed in an email.

"We are currently working on photo renderings," she said. "We’ll be excited to share them once they are complete."

Opponents of the plant have criticized previous AES renderings depicting the power plant from angles oppenents claim were too far away.

AES told the Daily Breeze in August that it intended to file by the end of September its plans to rebuild the plant to comply with new statewide regulations banning once-through cooling.

Once-through cooling plants, including AES Redondo Beach, use ocean water to cool superheated steam produced by the boilers to spin the turbines in a natural gas plant. AES Redondo Beach must retrofit, retire or apply for a special exemption to continue to use once-through cooling by 2020.

AES officials say the proposed new plant will be smaller, run cleaner and provide power when renewable resources are offline. Opponents say a new plant would run more often and emit more harmful particulate pollution, as well as continue to depress property values.

To prevent AES from building a new plant, political group No Power Plant has spearheaded an initiative that would make power generation incompatible with the site's zoning. The initiative calls for up to 40 percent commercial and institutional zoning on the property. The rest of the property would become parkland.

Signatures on the initiative petition are being counted by Los Angeles County; proponents of the measure aim to place it on the March city ballot.

In a note posted on the Tear Down this Power Plant blog, Building a Better Redondo founder Jim Light, an ardent opponent of the power plant, wrote, "It is obvious that resident pressure has been effective … Keep (up) the good work and keep the pressure on…we have them on the run!"