COBB, Calif. — All the signs of human activity are still there. Papers and manuals litter tables and desks. Handwritten charts cover some of the walls. Signs warn that "Ear Protection Is Required" to protect workers from the deafening noise.
Everything is there--except the people.
Echoing through the silent building are the footsteps of Glen Gordon, last manager of the state Department of Water Resources' Bottle Rock Geothermal Power Plant before it was shut down in 1990. Disappointment is etched in his face. "It was a beautiful plant," he says reverently. "Those of us who worked here were pretty proud of it."
Nestled among the lush green hills above Napa Valley, Bottle Rock and its sister plant a few miles away stand as towering monuments to government miscalculations and mistakes. Bottle Rock has not produced a kilowatt of electricity in three years. Its sister, the South Geysers Power Plant, never opened.
When the revenue bonds on the plants are finally paid in 2024, water users will have sunk more than $450 million into the two projects, making them the state's most expensive white elephants. The customers of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California will have shouldered 80% of the cost.
The two plants were conceived with the loftiest of goals and intentions in the 1970s when clean, cheap sources of energy were being sought to offset high-priced OPEC oil.
The state, often criticized for taking too long to act, moved with such speed on the geothermal project that it was able to move from conception to finished plant in less than a decade. Critics later complained that this was one instance when government moved too fast.
In the haste to bring the facilities on-line, government officials--especially in the case of South Geysers--too quickly accepted the word of geologists and private developers who said that steam was plentiful enough at the sites to run the facilities for 30 years.
As it turned out, there was not enough steam to run South Geysers at all. At Bottle Rock, it lasted five years.
Hidden by hills and virtually inaccessible to casual passersby, the plants are largely forgotten, located near the community of Cobb, population 1,477. Many residents who own vacation cabins in nearby hamlets do not know the plants are there. Once a year they merit eight paragraphs in the Department of Water Resources 370-page annual report on the State Water Project called Bulletin 132.
This anonymity contrasts sharply with the high expectations that once surrounded them.
In the heyday of the geothermal movement, the plant sites were visited frequently by top state officials--including once by Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., who brought along an entourage of reporters and photographers to record optimistic predictions of the great potential of geothermal steam.
The impetus for the Bottle Rock and South Geysers plants came in the mid-1970s when America was reeling from the shock of the OPEC oil embargo and spiraling energy costs. For California government, the need for alternative energy was particularly pressing because long-term contracts providing inexpensive electrical power for the massive State Water Project were soon to expire and officials feared large price hikes.
The water project, a critical source of water for 20 million residents, requires billions of kilowatts of electricity each year to carry water from Oroville Dam in Northern California to the end of the state's 444-mile aqueduct at Lake Perris in Riverside County.
Geothermal power seemed an ideal solution. California is one of the few places in the world with large underground steam reservoirs, areas where underground water comes in contact with molten rock near the Earth's surface. To tap the energy, wells are drilled and the steam piped to a power plant where it turns turbines that generate electricity.
The richest of California's steam reservoirs was believed to be the geysers, a geothermal area 90 miles north of San Francisco that was discovered in 1847. Commercial power production began here in 1960 and many companies, including Pacific Gas & Electric Co., had successful plants.
"There was this tantalizing idea that if you develop the geysers, you could find a renewable, reliable resource where the cost would be steady and you could break away from the price escalations and uncertainty of the oil market," said Richard Maullin, who served as Brown's first chairman of the state Energy Commission.
Hoping to get at least one plant on line before power contracts expired in 1983, the state quickly floated bonds to finance construction of two plants. The bonds would be paid off by customers of the State Water Project, and the project's largest customer and biggest user of energy was the MWD.
The plans called for the state to construct and manage the plants, but the steam to run them would be purchased from private companies that would develop, operate and maintain adjacent steam fields.
