Silicon Valley Power Fight Continues

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SAN JOSE, Calif., -- Opponents of a power plant that would provide Silicon Valley with a reliable supply of electricity plan to continue their fight in court in the wake of the governor of California's call for approval of the project. San Jose city officials and residents of the San Jose neighborhood where the proposed plant would be located have decided to shift their focus away from the political stage to the legal arena even before Gov. Gray Davis issued a news release calling for the regulatory approval of the Metcalf Energy Center. Davis urged the California Energy Commission to quickly approve construction of the project, a 600-megawatt, gas-fired plant that would feed the electricity-hungry high-tech plants in the area beginning in early 2003. "When the opportunity presents itself to get more megawatts on-line, we have to seize it," Davis said in his release. "In this energy crisis, inaction is our enemy. It's time to stop talking about Metcalf -- and start building it." San Jose city attorneys, however, have been preparing legal arguments that would prevent the Energy Commission from overriding local opposition to the project when the commissioners vote on the project this summer. California's continuing electricity crunch has stirred up concerns that the Silicon Valley economy could be knocked for a loop if rolling blackouts this summer caused repeated outages at computer plants and Internet firms that require large amounts of power. The situation has inspired other states to actively urge Silicon Valley companies to relocate. "According to the Electric Power Research Institute, high-technology firms in Silicon Valley can lose up to $1 million per minute during power outages," said Whit Allen, vice president of Sure Power Corp., a Connecticut firm that manufactures power supplies for industrial computer systems. "Data centers ... that host thousands of racks of computer equipment that serve e-commerce and other mission-critical applications, don't just need electricity, they need ultra-reliable, always-up power." The people in the south San Jose neighborhood where Calpine and Bechtel planned to build the Metcalf plant received backing from Mayor Ron Gonzalez and from Cisco Systems, the high-tech giant that had planned to build a new corporate campus near the power plant site. The growing power crisis, however, rallied supporters of the plant including Davis and state legislators as well as environmental groups, the NAACP and the American Lung Association, the Mercury-News said. "I don't think anyone in city hall, including the mayor, envisioned the potential of this crisis," a San Jose political analyst told the newspaper. "I think everybody thought Calpine was using scare tactics to win approval of Metcalf." Gonzalez and other city officials, however, continued to side with residents who want the plant built in a less-populated area. Those who are vocal against the plant have said that it is just too large a project for a residential area.