LADWP DS 104 Task Force Meeting
Wednesday 10/3/2012
Report by Jim Rea, Task Force Member
The DS 104 Task Force met for the second time last night and the meeting went fairly smoothly.
At the beginning, there were some procedural concerns about the process and about the independence of the facilitator, whose employer AECOM had some early involvement with some environmental documents filed regarding the Marquez Knolls site. DWP uses four separate contractors for CEQA matters and AECOM is one of them. The early involvement was news to the facilitator and to the LADWP personnel on hand. The facilitator pledged to bring a written statement from AECOM that they will have no further involvement in the development of the DS 104 site.
Issue was also raised about selection of the facilitator and a request was made to interview a variety of candidates and allow the Task Force to make a selection. DWP response was that process would take 18 months, to write a RFP, select base candidates, etc. It was decided in the interest of limited time for the Task Force's duties to reach into their contractor pool and bring in a facilitator from there.
Final issue was with regard to the experience with the existing facilitator (Nancy Graham). She pledged to bring in a summary of her experience with similar facilitation engagements for the next meeting.
Meeting then moved to the first agenda item: presentation on the need for a new DS located in the western portion of Pacific Palisades.
Presented a map showing Pacific Palisades divided into two zones with the western zone extending though Sunset Mesa to the LA County line. DS 29 is provides distribution service to the eastern portion and the load center for DS 104 is at the approximate center of the western section.
The fundamental argument for the need for an additional DS is that DS 29 has been operating at levels over design capacity since 2004 and at its peak in 2010 has reached levels above 33% over capacity. The DS can operate at those levels but not without a toll on equipment and long-term reliability. They indicated that load growth is increasing at a rate of 1% per year. Given the protracted amount of time to deploy a new DS (5 1/2 years) they have to proceed without delay in siting this new DS.
DWP indicated that they do have the alternative of extending circuits from DS 29 up into the western Palisades region but that alternative would be very expensive, disruptive while lots of streets would be opened up and the lines would suffer from energy loss due to the length of their runs.
Discussion went to shifting of demand and I challenged their assertion that solar does not work when the sun does not shine, citing Laura Mack's insistence that alternatives featuring local storage be considered. DWP's response was that they took a look at the local storage examples provided by Ms. Mack and concluded that 1) they were early stage technology and small implementations, 2) would require a facility of similar size to the DS to locate the batteries, giving a rough estimate of 10 or more shipping container sized units to be deployed, so there still has to be a site selection and 3) a back of the envelope calculation of $40 million for that amount of storage capacity.
We moved on to the final stage of the process which was to examine each of the sites that have been considered. Large maps showing satellite views and street views were laid out presenting 13 sites that DWP had considered. My immediate question was why the 6.42 acre parcel on Sunset behind the strip mall at the base of Palisades Drive, which is currently listed for sale was not included on the map, as I had specifically discussed the site with DWP real estate staff (as had Councilman Rosendahl's office and others). DWP did not have a good answer but promised to include the site on the map for the next meeting.
The Task Force looked at each site and gave comments good and bad for each. The object of the exercise was to identify 4 or 5 sites that we could review in detail at the next meeting, while not spending time on sites that the community felt had no merit. As we reviewed the sites, there were some candidates, that at this cursory level of review appeared to have some merit among the consensus of the Task Force. At the end of the meeting, we were given ballots for each of us to select our four favorite candidates for further consideration. That will serve as the input to the sites we discuss in the next meeting.
Finally, we were each given 'homework' to go look for additional sites that might be candidates for consideration and to bring those recommendations to the next meeting.
The next meeting of the Task Force is October 17 at 7:00 PM.
The handout materials for the meeting can be downloaded from the link below:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BwkQFPaAN4zwbFhNX1g3d0NlZW8
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