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Say no to REACH’s plan to industrialize Morro Bay, protect our coastline

October 21, 2023

OPINION by GAIL JOHNSON

An open letter to REACH, a regional economic action coalition:

Recently, you invited citizens of the San Luis Obispo County to offer public comments regarding your “economic development” strategies.  I would like to comment on your plans for Morro Bay.

I am a voting resident of Morro Bay, and a proud supporter of the NoBESS movement and the Citizen’s Initiative to stop the industrialization of our town.  I oppose the offshore wind proposals and hope to see the Chumash Heritage Marine Sanctuary completely close the gap in the ocean’s protection between Monterey and Gaviota.

As a concerned citizen, I have attended many of your community meetings and have read most of your propaganda. I take issue with your misrepresentations and cheerful assessments of the “potential” our town offers to “industry”.  I see the word “industry” and understand that you literally mean “industrialization”.

As far as I can tell, none of your propaganda admits to the environmental and natural degradation that will follow the industrialization that you so positively portray. There is nothing “clean” about the clean energy plans that you would try to thrust upon us. You have ignored the wishes of the citizens who will be negatively affected by your vision of an industrialized future and its long-term consequences. We do not want to be the “collateral damage” to your profit-driven schemes.

You tout your extensive feedback from “stakeholders.”  I am a stakeholder, a property owner and taxpayer, and I don’t recall ever giving you permission to ruin my town. In fact, in early 2023, a survey circulated by the City of Morro Bay, the Morro Bay Power Plant Master Plan Community Survey, documented that a vast majority of the citizens of Morro Bay do not want the BESS facility on the old power plant site. Nor do they want their beaches and bay industrialized.

Your Waterfront Infrastructure Study Report (WISR) states:  “ . . . there are no prominent commercial or industrial ports, despite the region’s long legacy in the commercial fishing industry.”

There is a very good reason why our waterfront has not been industrialized: Our vibrant commercial fishing industry does not require the industrialization of our harbor. The current zoning, as set forth in “Plan Morro Bay” and certified by the California Coastal Commission in Nov. 2022, is perfectly suited to the current use, and we aim to keep it as such.
In this same WISR (page 57) you imply that the Morro Bay Harbor Department has “coordinated” with you to enable a “smaller” offshore wind support facility development site on our shoreline near the old PG&E intake building.

You may be forgiven for believing our residents were sympathetic to your schemes.  You were mislead by past elected city officials and civic leaders. But the tides have changed, and we clearly do not endorse your activities.

Our former mayor was voted out by a margin of 3 to 2, and others who “coordinated” with you have been forced out of their positions of influence. You optimistically state that “changes to local zoning laws may be needed to enable a development at this site . . . to support mooring of larger . . . vessels).” I would like to correct you: the zoning laws must be changed in order to heave your plans on us, and our initiative, when successful, will prohibit the rezoning of the Morro Bay beaches and the power plant site.

In plain sight, your “REACH 2030” landing page states your true intention regarding the Diablo Canyon Property, but it could apply to all of the Central Coast:  (the decommissioning of Diablo) “. . . presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to repurpose existing infrastructure and thousands of acres of pristine land and unspoiled coastline.”

I would like to emphatically state that we do not want our unspoiled coastline and pristine land “repurposed.” No, thanks!

I am suspicious of your use of the words “opportunity zones.” Do you consider that our beautiful coastal zones are underdeveloped and ripe for “optimization?” There are always unintended consequences to frenzied and profit-driven movements. Do not gamble with our future or the health of our citizens, our estuary, wildlife, economic vitality and way of life.

Do not confuse our abhorrence of your proposed development of our town as a rejection of the need for “renewable energy.” We are not opposed to renewable energy or “clean technology.” We simply feel that there is a proper place for the installation of unproven, experimental, dangerous and environmentally damaging industrial developments.

You may see the Central Coast as the “hub of renewable energy.” There are plenty of appropriate and desolate inland sites where your renewable energy ambitions will be appreciated, but the coastal areas are not among them.

You are correct about this statement:  “ . . . the Central Coast is known for its stunning outdoor attractions, including beaches, mountains, and vineyards . . .  These assets not only provide recreational opportunities and support a high quality of life for residents, but they also contribute to the region’s overall economic vitality by supporting the tourism industry. These cultural assets . . . are an important driver of economic development, supporting jobs, businesses, and tourism in the region.”  And: “Not only is tourism a substantial contributor to the local economy, but it also reflects the high quality of life that Central Coast residents value.”

Tourism is one of the leading sources of revenue for Morro Bay. Your plan for industrializing our town will jeopardize our Embarcadero, our bay, our beaches and ocean, and will severely impact our tourism, recreation, commercial fishing and our quality of life.

There are always unintended consequences to frenzied and risky movements.  It is common for corporations to capitalize on their profits while off-loading the costs on to rate-payers and small communities.  Do not gamble with our future or the health of our citizens, our estuary, wildlife, economic vitality and way of life.

Please go away.  We don’t need you, REACH.

Gail Johnson is a lifelong resident of San Luis Obispo County who is working to protect our coastline.


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Pls specify what is the “massive industrialization” your worried about. Building footprint, height, traffic impacts. What is the pending catastrophe you fear?

The existing power plant is an eyesore that should be removed and the site redeveloped.


-23

Are you suggesting replacing a inoperative eyesore, with an operating eyesore? Arguably, an eyesore that is many times more dangerous and polluting?


What part of the Opinion piece was not clear to the rest of us?


10

Sure, the opinion piece makes various assertions about industrialization. So, my questions are what are the physical characteristics of this “industrialization”, i.e., building footprint, height, traffic impacts? Upshot, is this a tempest in a teapot?


-9

Let me give this a shot. The battery plant will be 3, 45-foot tall (4+ stories), concrete bunkers filled with about 75,000 battery assemblies, totaling 600 megawatts capacity, potentially the largest in the world.


Each building is 90,000 square feet and the three cover some 22 acres of the site of the old fuel tank farm that was removed over a decade ago (now just empty dunes scrub; nature retaking the land).


Each of these buildings’ battery assemblies, stacked up like in a stereo cabinet, will have its own fire suppression system, all hooked together via computers.


Outside each building will be hundreds of power converters that turn the ac/dc power into dc for storage in the batteries, and then change it back when it’s sent out on the wires to the power grid.


And all this will be in a town whose fire department’s strategic plan calls for having four, full time firefighters on duty at all time (four shifts of four each, plus a chief and fire marshal, 16 total, full time firefighters in this department).


As for the harbor, the wind farms are expected to need a great deal of upgrade work on harbor facilities to be able to accommodate the crew boats, the ones that ferry workers and equipment back and forth, 57 miles each way, to the wind farm site.


The harbor director recently said he’d met with one company and they expect to bring in their crew boat(s) about twice a month for supplies and refueling, etc… and want to be able to use the T-pier for that purpose.


I don’t know if that means they intend to put in moorings in the outer, Estero Bay or not, but that was the implication (so much of this is still undecided).


They also need a place where they can work on stuff, a big maintenance yard and office, plus a control room that will have to be the hub for monitoring and communicating with the turbines’ through telemetry, and the boats too.


They might have to hardwire each turbine back to the control room(s) as the site is over the horizon from Morro Bay and out of range for wireless, unless they use satellite comms.


The work yard doesn’t have to be on the waterfront, but they need to send the equipment and such out there, so they’ll probably need to be able to load large heavy pieces of equipment on the boats. The North T-pier has a lot of broken and loose pilings that need to be replaced, so in that regard, the project will repair a vital facility to the working harbor.


The other two companies haven’t said anything yet about what facilities they will need, but the feds have already given the City $1.5 million to address the repairs and upgrades the north T-pier will need.


The State Lands Commission study on harbors from Bodega Bay to Long Beach estimated Morro Bay would need +/- $50 million in upgrades and dredging work to be able to accommodate the smallest of the three sizes of boats that will be used.


The wind farms will have three sizes of boats — relatively small (150-180-feet or so) crew boats; 300′ maintenance boats, and enormous crane/tow boats to tow the turbines, blocks, chains to the site, set the moorings and erect the turbines.


State Lands said none of the ports anywhere near the site can support all three sized boats.


And the transmission wires will be buried in the seafloor and all run to a floating substation that would be located somewhere in between the wind farm site and Morro Bay, where the electricity is expected to come ashore.


The thing is that there are three companies that will be looking for accommodations/upgraded facilities, so whatever one might need, multiply that by three to get a picture of the impacts.


And the pisser of all this is that right now, this energy is predicted to cost three times as much as the same wind turbines installed on land where they are easily accessible and more economically maintained (but they’re ugly, so put them far out at sea, where we don’t have to look at them!).


Hope this helps


0

From what I’ve seen “tourism” is just as, if not more destructive to the “stunning outdoor attractions, including beaches, mountains, and vineyards” we all love so much…


7

What a selfish insane NIMBY and I’ll bet the farm I’ve been here a lot longer than she has. There is an existing 500kV connection from Morro Bay to the Pacific Inter-tie. This makes the former PG&E site the best and least impactful energy storage site.


-19

You are misinformed. There has never been a 500kv line terminating at Morro Bay SW station. The Diablo-Gates #1 500 kv line crosses HWY 41 four miles east of Morro Bay. I operated the Los Padres electric transmission system for 36 years. As the first responder on 3/10/95 when the Honda trash pump I borrowed from the Coast Guard cutter couldn’t keep up with the creek flooding into the switchyard control room basement, I escorted two Morro Bay fire dept pumpers into the back entrance of the switchyard to lower the 8′ of basement water level that was submerging DC distribution panels and dimming all the alarm annunciators due to DC grounds. Ground water can be found at 6′ below grade where circuit breakers 112 & 122 are located. The Motto Bay switchyard will always be prone flooding and needs to be moved to Santa Margarita.


15

I hate to inform the letter writer that climate change poses a far greater threat to Morro Bay than industrialization. The U.S. must wean itself off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Wind, solar and nuclear power must be ramped up to achieve California’s zero-emission goals.


Right now the world is like a drunk person wearing a blindfold who is slowly stumbling toward a cliff. We must halt his process by establishing reliable, renewable power throughout the nation. Incredibly, ruby red Texas is the state that produces the most renewable energy, partly because they simply don’t allow NIMBY attitudes like yours to stop the inevitable.


At any rate, everything I’ve read from scientists and engineers is that offshore wind farms are not only possible but also preferable.


-65

Seems to be a lot of people that whine about fossil fuels, they keep going on and on about power plants and automobiles, but yet the public servants that you elect fly all over the world for climate conferences, just a day or two ago your governor announced that he was going to go to China to talk about climate with a stop off in Israel, that whole trip is a waste of fossil fuel, then we have Vandenburg air force base sending rockets out it seems like weekly, yet we don’t here people like you whining about that.

What we the people of Morro Bay don’t want is the battery storage facility built here, its not safe no matter what the goverment/vista tells us and we’ll see that trash from the highway, that is the arguement that former public servants, (mayors) and more whiners told us about the old sewer plant, now look at that mess as you come into town from the south, or the pumps and garbage next to Lemos pet store, that trash is real appealing isn’t it, don’t whine about the PG&E stacks either, that plant most likely would have hit the same opposition today as this phoney batt storage, this facility will cost the city plenty of money, vista and the govt tell us one thing and another will happen, it’ll be just like the dope deals that have been done here in this county the monies collected will take care of all problems, now look at it the politicians want to dig into the taxpayers pocket to fix the problems they created.

Scream NO on battery storage

Now while we’re on the subject of longivity of people here in town I’ve got you beat derasmus, my people legally imagrated here to Morro Bay in the late 1800’s, both sides of my family, so I’ve been around here for a while.


27

Always the same weak argument. How dare the governor fly to China. In case you hadn’t noticed, about 50% of the products sold in America come from China. It is imperative that our leaders meet with theirs.


Also, in case you hadn’t noticed, the world is connected by satellites so those rocket launches are also imperative. Until we have zero-emission flying machines (which are being developed) we have to use jets.


That is not the case with ground transportation which is currently experiencing a revolution. Battery electric and hydrogen vehicles will soon take over the roads and that’s why we need as much wind, solar and nuclear power as possible.


-25

I would add natural gas to the mix, which is a waste product of petroleum production, cheap. Going to be burned off anyway.


-11

It’s not a “waste product”, but a naturally occurring gas. The only real problem is, there is more of it, than we have the means to use it.


10

Gail, the hubris and arrogance of people like yourself always amazes me. While I don’t know for certain but I suspect you are a relatively recent transplant to Morro Bay but you clearly have strong ideas about how to conserve or remake the community in your own image, As for me, I moved to MB as a young boy in 1963 and I was a newcomer. At that time it was a “vibrant“ fishing and industrial town, it isn’t now, and it never will be again. The “quaint fishing village” persona that we knew in the 1950s and 60s (and still propagated by some) is is a farce, it is gone, and unlikely to return. As for “industrialization” who do you think built the Morro Bay waterfront? Until the US Navy got a hold of it there was little in the way of a usable harbor. Morro Bay was an estuarial lagoon there was no Embarcadero like we see today and small boats routinely capsized in the bay because of swells and wind waves because the breakwaters were still being planned and built. It was the United States Navy, and the War Department all in the 1940s that created the waterfront and Embarcadero that we enjoy today.


Post World War II it was Pacific Gas & Electric Company that made investments in the community (like MB High School). When I was a kid MB was a commercial fishing ( and abalone) town, and it had a kind of company town feeling and that company was PG&E. Yes, the community and especially the waterfront, was very industrial. For example, where the Otter Rock cafe once operated was Glenn Johnsons Machine Shop. Where the “Boatyard” retail is now once was a thriving boatyard including the empty lot across the street. The Flying Dutchman was Brown’s Tackle shop where you could purchase bait, fishing gear, a .22 rifle and 12 gauge ammo to go duck hunting in the back bay. Anyway, all of this “industrialization “ spawned head-of-household jobs, engineers and technicians at the power plant and commercial fishermen, commercial divers, marine mechanics, boatyard workers…etc most of whom had kids I went to school with. These people owned homes, and wives were able to stay at home, run the household and maintain a reasonably vibrant middle class existence, That is ended, it’s gone. So do you think kayakers, and birdwatching, and kite, festivals, pirate festivals and avocado festivals are going to carry the day? You’re dreaming.


Change is inevitable. Part of being a self actualized grown-up is accepting change in one’s life while trying to mitigate the deleterious impacts of that change and getting MOST of what you want from the change makers.


-3

Thanks for the blast from the past. I remember, as a visitor, the boatyard and the tackle shop. And you are right about change.


6

While I agree that circumstance created the modern Morro Bay, recall also, that the population of MB, then, was less than 1/4 of what it is now. Nobody lived on the hills behind town. Nobody lived on the flats to the North. Other than the fishermen, their families, townfolk who always live in a small town, a couple of dairy’s, and a couple of beef ranches, MB had nobody to fight against the Navy, or PG&E.


Well, now we do. And, we don’t want to see more steel and concrete thrown up, just because “it’s already been done”.


2

This opinion is NIMBY of the first order. I can’t wait till all of the new housing laws kick in and all the new buildings sprout up in Morro Bay. Lol


In other news: PG&E asks California regulators to approve a 22% rate hike. The company is looking to raise rates by about 22%, saying that that accounts not just for inflation but also the high price of wholesale natural gas. On top of that, it wants the extra revenue for risk reduction. 


This is why we need more wind power in California.


-51

So you would think that the proposed wind power off of our shore will be cheaper than what PG&E is, you had better go look at some of these operations that are in use already you’ll see that it is more expensive and they are ugly.


41

Natural gas plants cost a little less to build than wind or solar, however ng plants have fuel costs.


Ugly? You wont be able to see them off shore and you wont see the ugly stacks in Morro Bay ether.


U.S. Construction Costs Dropped for Solar, Wind, & Natural Gas-Fired Generators in 2021


-39

tourism is a finite bogus means of income with no chance of sustainability if we continue to allow Rich people to over use resources. Morro bay is historically an industrial Depot. it housed oil for ages. Tourism is not a bread and butter for real locals. locals are. I see the same people who love oil be Nimbys. can’t have it both ways.


-33

We already have traffic back ups in our little town… who in their right mind thinks this is a good thing for Morro Bay?…

Say no thankyou find another sucker….

The Mayor won because she said she is going to fight this…. lets hope she is going to….


36

So I assume that I will see you at the next demonstration to keep Diablo canyon running. It is the cleanest energy around. It is because of these fears of nuclear that we are trying to create wind farms and battery storage sites. We do not need these things if we keep nuclear plants going.


All the alternative forms of energy are ok as long as they are somewhere else.


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