Opposition to AES Power Plant Not New

Redondo Beach has been home to a for longer than anyone can remember.

Seriously. The first plant went up in 1897—how many 114-year-olds are there in the city?

A fellow named G. J. Lindsay put up a building around his 1100-volt generator back in the 19th century—creating the first power plant—and sold electricity for homes and street lights for about five years.

At that point, the San Gabriel Electric Company bought the land, dismantled Lindsay's generator, and put up a small electrical substation.

(Before Lindsay, the site was a salt works, mining the mineral from a natural salt lake about 200 by 600 feet. You can read about that.)

San Gabriel Electric became Pacific Light and Power Corporation—one of Henry Huntington's companies. In 1906, PLPC built a new concrete-and-metal steam plant on the property.

Why there? Unlimited clean water could be piped in to cool the condensers, and fuel to run the engines came from oil wells in the area. Plus, the electricity could go directly to power Huntington’s electric railway cars—they didn't even bother with transformers.

The state-of-the-art plant doubled in size in 1911 to become the fourth largest in the United States. The original three 5,000-kilowatt generators were supplemented by two turbo-generators capable of generating 12,000 kilowatts each.

But only two years later, other plants replaced the Redondo Beach output and the local power plant was relegated to back-up status. 

In 1917, Southern California Edison merged with PLPC but rarely fired up the generators. The Redondo Beach facility decayed and by the Depression, it was abandoned—just a big, obsolete chunk of concrete.

The plant most Redondo Beach residents remember—going all the way back to their childhood—was a product of post-World War II growth and a population boom.

Like many cities in postwar Southern California, Redondo's population had nearly doubled since 1940. New industries boomed, bringing more and more people—and everyone needed more electricity.

So SCE decided to build a new, $38-million generating facility in Redondo Beach. SCE already owned the property, and the ocean water was there to cool the condensers.

It was out with the old, and in with the new! After two years of scrapping and rebuilding, SCE's Plant One went online in February 1948 and operated through 1987, generating up to 240 megawatts of power. Plant Two began operating in 1954. At the time, SCE's Redondo Beach facility produced 20 times the power needed by all the Beach Cities and the Palos Verdes Peninsula combined.

Initially, plant was seen as an economic blessing. Almost half of all Redondo Beach's tax revenue—44 cents on every tax dollar—came from Edison.

It hasn't exactly been smooth sailing—a perfect marriage of industry and civic pride—since then, even after AES took over the plant from SCE in 1997. In fact, the recent uproar over AES' plans to rebuild is just one more iteration of protests that date back at least to the 1960s.

In 1967, residents of Redondo Beach began to complain about sooty residue on their homes and in their yards. By 1976, citizens pushed for a study to examine the noise pollution created by SCE, though the mayor vetoed the idea.

Into the early 1990s—when artist Wyland covered 54,511 square feet of plain wall with Whaling Wall XXXI, a mural filled with eleven gray whales and one giant blue whale—the controversy continued.

The noise pollution complaints did not go away; they grew more strident. In 1990, 25 picketers marched outside the power plant.

Twice, the city took SCE to court over noise, and twice lost because the courts decided Redondo Beach's noise laws were confusing and unreliable.

At one point, SCE even bought the condominiums of two angry families who claimed that the sounds—shrieking steam valves going off at all hours as well as constant low-intensity noise—was causing structural damage.

Then there were the fears about the power lines causing cancer, or that an earthquake and resulting liquefaction might destroy the plant and environs.

The AQMD imposed increasingly harsh regulations on smokestack emissions. In an effort to comply, SCE installed two 10,000 gallon tanks of ammonia to use in reducing the pollution, but the presence of so much ammonia set off another round of protests from worried neighbors.

That happened about the same time that the noise pollution complaints reached their peak. In fact, it got so bad that the city hired a special attorney just to deal with SCE.

SCE was fined in the mid-1990s for hazardous waste dumping in which they used acid solutions to clean the boilers and discharged them improperly. All in all, by the time SCE sold the plant to AES in 1997, many folks hoped that the place would be shut down for good.

AES did downsize, shutting down and demolishing some of the smokestacks. The current plant generates 1310 megawatts of power, and it runs less than 5 percent of the time.

Once again, cries for the removal of the power plant have grown strident, especially since AES must eliminate its use of once-through cooling, which uses ocean water, at the plant by 2020.

AES' proposal for building a new, smaller, cleaner, leaner power plant is just another step in a story that began 114 years ago. It remains to be seen whether AES will repower (rebuild) the current plant or the property will become a park with some commercial use, as opponents of AES' plans desire.