McKITTRICK, Calif. — You could think of this as California's own little slice of west Texas.
Here in the scruffy brown hills of western Kern County, oil rigs grow more easily than trees, pickups are more common than cars, and chicken fried steak is the most popular dish at Mike and Annie's McKittrick Hotel.
The hotel--which no longer offers lodging, just food and drink, and plenty of it--is bustling these days with the roustabout energy of a Lone Star construction camp. Just down the road, a mammoth electrical power plant is rising out of the sagebrush, its generators housed in four boxy buildings the size of airplane hangars.
It is one of six new major gas-fired power plants expected to be built in Kern County over the next several years, an electrical construction boom unmatched anywhere in California. Kern, which already has a large surplus of electricity, is cementing its place as California's energy capital, assuming far more than its share of the burden in recharging the state's drained power supplies.
Over the next several years, the county will add nearly 5,000 megawatts of power to the statewide grid. That is more than California now imports, on average, from out-of-state suppliers. It's enough to supply about five counties the size of Kern, which fills the dusty southern rim of the San Joaquin Valley and has a population of 662,000.
In some parts of the state, a proposal to build a new power plant is a call to throw up the barricades. In recent months, intense community opposition has forced developers to pull back proposals to build major plants in South Gate and San Jose, although Gov. Gray Davis has tried to revive plans for the San Jose plant.
You don't hear a lot of not-in-my-backyard talk in Kern County.
"There should be power plants in everybody's backyard," said Paul Gipe, chairman of the Kern chapter of the Sierra Club, which did not oppose any of the new plants. "If people are concerned about having too many power plants, they should think twice when they flip on the light switch."
New, natural gas-fired power plants, Gipe reasoned, are relatively clean and will not add significantly to the county's serious air pollution problems. Ideally, he said, they will allow the state to close some older, dirtier plants that cause considerably more environmental damage.
If environmentalists don't oppose the plants, it's not too much of a leap to guess that some people might be positively thrilled about them.
