The natural-gas powerplant in Morro Bay, California, was retired in 2014, but locals hope the plant?s electrical connections will be used to bring wave energy online. Photos by the author.
I always enjoy riding over to Morro Bay…and not just for the pleasure of calamari and chips at Giovanni?s. Coming down the west slope of the Coastal Range I see three tall towers in the distance, looking just like a cricket wicket. All they lack are the two little bails balanced between the three. For some 60 years, since the early ?50s, these 450-foot towers known as The Stacks vented the natural gas-fired powerplant. Which, for the environmentally concerned, is about as clean a fossil-fuel combustible as can be found. At full throttle the plant could generate some 650 megawatts. The Kern River suffered from California?s five-year drought, but the rainy winter of 2016-2017 got the water flowing again; that?s the State Route 178 bridge in the background.
Then a nuclear powerplant was built a few miles down the coast, and Morro Bay became less and less important in the matter of generating energy. It was closed in 2014, but the word was that an outfit called GWave would build a wave farm out in the ocean, wiring that energy into the old plant, since it had the all the connections needed to transmit electricity. No telling what might happen, but it would be nice to have an infinite supply of power that required no fueling system.
Topaz Solar Farms, out on the Carrizo Plain on State Ro...