Power Plants

Despite state goals to encourage alternative energy, no application to build a large solar power plant in California has been approved in 18 years, and new projects could face significant delays in the bureaucracy, the state auditor said Thursday. An audit found that power plants must go through multiple agencies for approval, and there is no one authority that can smooth the process.

California regulators are recommending a program that requires utilities to obtain permits for emissions at out-of-state power plants that generate electricity sent into the state and endorsed a cap-and-trade system that allows polluters to trade permits. Regulating emissions at the point of delivery into the California electricity system is preferable because the most populous U.S. state imports a fifth of its power, the Public Utilities Commission said in a proposal on its website dated Feb.

Fighting global warming is the feel-good cause of the moment. But in California, the self-congratulation that followed the 2006 passage of the nation's first comprehensive law to curb emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases is fast turning to acrimony. A ferocious behind-the-scenes brawl over how to regulate electricity plants, the biggest source of carbon dioxide after motor vehicles, has pitted Southern California's public power generators against its for-profit utilities. Why?

A bid by a San Diego Gas & Electric contractor to build a controversial power plant in Ladera Ranch in south Orange County has been shelved, according to legal documents filed Friday. Wellhead Power Margarita LLC has asked Orange County to rescind project approval that it had been granted by the county planning commission, handing a major victory to residents who had formed the group Ladera Hope. "We have won, and it's historic," said Jon Forrest, a Ladera Hope spokesman.

PG&E Corp., the San Francisco-based parent of Pacific Gas & Electric Co., on Tuesday proposed building an $850-million natural-gas fueled power plant in Alameda County, near Oakland, to meet rising electricity demand. The utility acquired the Tesla Generating Station site and development rights July 17 from closely held ESI Energy, PG&E said Tuesday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The utility wants state regulatory approval by Jan.

Does Southern California need a dozen or so new gas-fired power plants -- and if it does, can it build them? No one seems to know for sure. The region's long-term plans to generate electricity to serve a growing population and to replace decades-old dirty plants were thrown into disarray this week, when a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled Tuesday that local authorities had failed to do the necessary environmental and health analyses.

Not far from the blinking casinos of this gambler's paradise lies what could be called the Biggest Little Power Plant in the World. Tucked into a few dusty acres across from a shopping mall, it uses steam heat from deep within the Earth's crust to generate electricity. Known as geothermal, the energy is clean, reliable and so abundant that this facility produces more than enough electricity to power every home in Reno, population 221,000. "There's no smoke.

Southern California Edison on Monday unveiled its newest power plant: 33,700 solar panels atop a warehouse in Fontana that will feed green energy directly into the grid. It's the first piece of what the utility says could become the largest rooftop solar installation in the world, a swath of photovoltaic panels spanning two square miles. The 600,000-square-foot warehouse rooftop, owned by logistics firm ProLogis Inc.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday abandoned its push to revise two air pollution rules in ways that environmentalists had long opposed, abruptly dropping measures that the Bush administration had spent years preparing. One proposal would have made it easier to build a coal-fired power plant, refinery or factory near a national park. The other would have altered the rules that govern when power plants must install antipollution devices.

California's two senators this week offered markedly different approaches to slowing global warming, with Dianne Feinstein saying she may move to exempt power companies from her home state's landmark global warming laws and bring them under federal regulation instead. Coal-fired and other fossil-burning power plants are the largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States, producing a third of all emissions.