The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on July 25 accepted a revised Reliability Must-Run Agreement for two units at the AES Huntington Beach LLC power plant in California.
On June 3, as amended on June 5, AES Huntington Beach submitted for filing revisions to Rate Schedule No. 2, the executed Reliability Must-Run (RMR) Agreement for Huntington Beach Units 3 and 4, with the California Independent System Operator. This filing was put out for notice by FERC, with no protests or adverse comments filed.
CAISO and AES Huntington Beach said the revisions were needed due to delays in the commercial operation start for synchronous condensers at Units 3 and 4. The RMR agreement was worked out because reactive power for voltage support at this site is needed due to the extended outage in the region of the San Onofre nuclear plant. Southern California Edison said recently that it now plans to permanently close the nuclear plant, giving up on efforts to at least partially restart it in the near term.
The June 3 filing noted that Siemens is the vendor for the synchronous condensers. June 26 was the commercial operation date projected in the June 3 filing.
The Huntington Beach plant is due to be repowered with new gas-fired capacity. In June 2012, AES Southland LLC submitted an Application for Certification (AFC) to the California Energy Commission seeking permission to construct and operate a power generation facility, the Huntington Beach Energy Project (HBEP), located entirely within the footprint of the existing Huntington Beach Generating Station. That application is still pending, with the company hoping for an approval by the first quarter of 2014.
The HBEP is a proposed natural-gas fired, combined-cycle, air-cooled, 939-MW facility that will replace the AES Huntington Beach Generating Station. HBEP will consist of two independently operating, three-on-one, combined-cycle gas turbine power blocks. Each power block will consist of three-gas-fired combustion turbine generators (CTG), three supplemental fired heat recovery steam generators (HRSG), one steam turbine generator (STG), an air-cooled condenser, and related ancillary equipment.
