As a political activist, Buck Johns considers California’s energy crisis a fiasco. As a power plant builder, well, he could hardly be happier.
Constellation Energy Group, parent of Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., late last week approved a $500 million expenditure to fund Johns’ planned electric plant on the closed George Air Force Base in Victorville. Meanwhile, a suddenly sympathetic state energy agency was eagerly exploring the idea of letting Johns double the size of his proposed High Desert Power Project.
“I’m on the supply side of a supply-demand curve, and demand is going through the roof,” Johns crackled in his native Arkansas twang. “It’s great.”
Having cleared years of regulatory, legal and entitlement hurdles, Johns is ready to go on with the gas-fired, 750-megawatt plant. He said he believed Constellation’s enthusiasm for tapping into California’s huge, energy-starved market outweighed the jitters created by Gov. Gray Davis’ recent comments blaming out-of-state power producers for much of the state’s predicament.
Johns said he anticipates breaking ground in March and opening the plant in June 2003. High Desert is one of nine power projects approved by the state, but it is the only one in Southern California. Johns said he expects the plant will be the fifth of the nine to come online in a burst of power-plant construction in California that follows many years of inactivity. And Johns said his plant will be the first new “green-field” plant,one that is built from scratch instead of being an add-on to an existing plant.
With Constellation taking over, Johns said he will stay on as a consultant and retain a small interest in future profits.
Johns said the project’s planning and approval process has taken six years and cost $11 million, much of it spent in what he called redundant and useless environmental scrutiny.
“You should be able to do it at least in a third and maybe a sixth of that amount of time and with a tenth of the cost,” he said.
Yet Johns said that the present power crisis has caused “a complete reversal” in the attitude of state energy officials, who now want to engage industry players like himself.
In fact, Johns last Thursday hosted Bob Therkelsen, director of siting for the state Energy Commission, who wanted to discuss the possibility of expediting plans for a second 750-megawatt plant on the Victorville site. Johns said Therkelsen indicated that if Johns could secure the necessary air and water permits, the commission should be able to get the expansion approved in six months.
“He was wonderful,” Johns said. “He’s a big deal. He’d never been in my office before. I was in Sacramento and suggested it (a plant expansion) and he said, ‘I’ll be there.’ I said, ‘Glory be.’ ”
Johns pulled no punches, though, in criticizing the way state Democratic leaders are handling the energy crisis, and he staunchly defended power producers against charges that they have unfairly “profiteered” on the state.
Johns pointed out that the state power grid avoided a huge energy shortfall last week only after it was able to negotiate a big power purchase from a government agency in British Columbia and from the city-owned Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Johns contended that Los Angeles was able to exploit its status as a municipal utility by purchasing for a pittance power it is entitled to from the federal Bonneville Power Administration, then selling the same power for 15 times as much to the state in the open market.
“Talk about gaming the system,” Johns said. “Davis is a hypocrite. He’s lambasting private people who put up their own money. It’s government that’s gaming government and causing the blackouts.”
Johns said that while the current situation looks dire, he’s optimistic in the longer term. He said he expects the state and energy producers to agree on long-term contracts that will avert a meltdown, at the price of Californians paying some sort of premium for their energy for a few years.
“But it keeps the lights on,” he said.
Moreover, he predicted, the current crisis will result in power producers flocking into the state to increase the state’s power-generating capacity:
“This is America,” he said. “We will solve this problem. We can have cheap power, but it may take a few years. But we have to beat the ‘enviros’ back. We got to take all those old, dead-head plants, the outdated ones that we’re trying to make run, and replace them with gas turbines.” n
