Brightline Publishes Report on the Recent History and Current State of the Potrero Power Plant Debate

Environmental Justice Group Highlights Past Efforts to Stop San Francisco’s Proposal to Build New Power Plants and Current Plans to Close the City’s Last Remaining Power Plant







San Francisco, CA, February 9, 2009 – The debate about whether to build new fossil fuel power plants to replace San Francisco’s aging Mirant Potrero Power Plant was one of the City’s most contentious and complicated policy issues of 2008. By the end of the year, a longstanding plan to build $273 million worth of new power plants between the Potrero and Bayview-Hunters Point communities and at San Francisco Airport had been discarded in favor of a path toward closing the Potrero Plant in phases beginning in 2010, or shutting the plant entirely through a combination of renewable energy and upgrades to the city’s electrical grid.







In order to inform the next phase of policy discussions surrounding the need to close the Potrero Power Plant, civil rights advocacy organization Brightline Defense Project has published a paper entitled “The Recent History and Current State of the Potrero Power Plant Debate.” Brightline Executive Director Joshua Arce states that “recent reports that the Mirant Corporation has no intention of following through on its commitment to begin closure of the Potrero Plant next year require our coalition to re-energize.”







Arce’s statement refers to the diverse collection of national groups such as Sierra Club and Environmental Defense, local organizations such as Greenaction and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and recognized environmental leaders such as Van Jones and Robert Kennedy, Jr. that coalesced last spring in rallies, letters, and publications and urged San Francisco elected officials to abandon the city’s 2004 plan to build new power plants to replace Potrero.







San Francisco Supervisors Michela Alioto-Pier, Ross Mirkarimi, Chris Daly, and Tom Ammiano moved their colleagues to postpone several power plant votes last summer while Mayor Gavin Newsom pushed state regulators to endorse a path to closing the Potrero Plant without new power plants. On June 2, 2008 the president of the California Independent System Operator (ISO) Yakout Mansour wrote to Mayor Newsom that the ISO would agree to release the Potrero Plant from a contract that pays the Mirant Corporation to ...