power plant on the waterfront has been slated for closure for years but recently had its operational life extended at least through the end of 2023 because of punishing heat waves and potential power shortfalls. In Redondo Beach, the gas-fired AES Corp. Last year, a 400-foot smokestack at the shuttered 1950s-era Encina Power Station in Carlsbad was torn down, over the objections of preservationists. What that transition means for huge, polluting structures has looked different up and down the coast. “They’re seeing the fires, they’re seeing the heat waves, they’re seeing all the associated weather events, and it’s forming too strong a pattern to be denied.” “People are finally starting to get it,” he said.
And, in the case of underwater structures such as oil platforms off the coast, marine ecosystems have sprung up on and around them, and removal might be even more harmful, Pearse said.īut the energy transition, he said, is urgently needed because of climate change. Such decisions are complicated because the sites are often decades old and contaminated. “There are obviously a lot of advantages to trying to convert these facilities into something else that could be used - maybe in a similar way, maybe in a different way - but at least reused.”
“Man-made structures have a life cycle,” said Erin Pearse, director of the Initiative for Climate Leadership and Resilience at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. spokesman Brad Watson said in an email.īut the drama over what to do with the smokestacks stands as a harbinger of conflicts to come in California, where state law requires that all of the state’s electricity come from clean energy sources by 2045.Īs the state makes that transition, more communities will be forced to deal with the hulking industrial infrastructure that will be left behind. “This ‘stacks to storage’ concept transitions a retired fossil fuel site into a renewable energy center repurposing the existing infrastructure, saving time and money,” Vistra Corp. California ‘We’ve lost Tom’: Fatal shark attack in Morro Bay devastates family and alarms surfersĪ family grieves and a surfing community is wary after a great white shark kills a 42-year-old body boarder in Morro Bay on Christmas Eve.
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