Even though the owner of a power plant on Metcalf Road in San
Jose and air quality district officials have had difficulty finding
suitable sites where air monitoring stations could be installed in
Morgan Hill, city officials want them to keep looking.
Even though the owner of a power plant on Metcalf Road in San Jose and air quality district officials have had difficulty finding suitable sites where air monitoring stations could be installed in Morgan Hill, city officials want them to keep looking.
In 2005, when Calpine Corporation opened the Metcalf Energy Center, they made an agreement with the city of San Jose to install two air quality monitoring stations to measure the natural gas plant’s effects on Santa Clara County’s air. They agreed to provide all the equipment and pay for construction costs associated with the stations, and San Jose would be in charge of finding two suitable sites.
One of the stations would be upwind of the plant, and one would be downwind, ideally in Morgan Hill. The Metcalf Energy Center is about three miles north of Morgan Hill. At a meeting of the Morgan Hill City Council’s Utilities and Environment Committee last Thursday, Eric Stevenson of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District gave a presentation describing the apparent lack of viable locations for a monitoring station in Morgan Hill.
He said because much of the available land here is agricultural or too close to Highway 101, an air quality monitoring station in such an environment would be unlikely to accurately measure contents in the air that may have drifted down from the power plant on Metcalf Road.
“The agricultural land would dominate the readings because people would be tilling the soil twice a year, and the readings of normal air would be overtaken,” Stevenson said. He also suggested that exhaust fumes from vehicles traveling on U.S. 101 would complicate the desired air readings.
City officials are concerned with the presence of carbon monoxide, ozone gases and other harmful particulate matter that could be added to Morgan Hill’s air by the Metcalf Energy Center, a 600-megawatt natural gas power station.
City officials noted that funding and siting the air stations was not legally required of Calpine, but was more like a gesture of good will agreed to by the energy company and the city of San Jose.
Committee member Larry Carr said, “We were not a party to any agreement. We have tried to be a very loud voice.”
Morgan Hill resident Swanee Edwards addressed the committee to urge the city to continue voicing the need for the stations. “The people of Morgan Hill have to breathe this air,” Edwards said. She added that the 2005 agreement between San Jose and Calpine was apparently made “without a lot of research,” as they have just found out in recent months that there are no suitable sites.
Stevenson said district officials have identified a location for an upwind air quality monitoring site north of the power plant, but have not been able to acquire the land, so neither of the two promised stations has yet been established. He added there is an air quality monitoring station in Gilroy, but it is “fairly limited,” and the type of facility suggested for Morgan Hill would be more high-tech and would measure the air contents more thoroughly.
The Calpine Corporation announced its intent to stop pursuing the monitoring stations at a quarterly meeting in February 2007, according to previous statements from San Jose officials.
Stevenson said while Calpine would pay for equipment and construction, the district would be responsible for labor and operation costs for the air monitoring facility, which would be about $80,000 per year.
State-mandated monitoring instruments have been in place at the Metcalf Energy Center since startup, Stevenson said. Those instruments measure emissions of the plant’s smoke stacks, and would be reliable in determining if a plant failure was imminent.
Committee chair Marilyn Librers recommended that the city continue to urge San Jose officials and Calpine to identify a viable air monitoring facility site.
City program administrator Anthony Eulo said following last week’s meeting that improving Morgan Hill’s air quality is part of city hall’s “environmental agenda.” He said South Santa Clara County historically has among the lowest-quality air in the San Francisco Bay Area, and installing an air quality monitoring station here would benefit the community.
“When the (Metcalf) power plant was proposed, it was fairly clear that it was going to impact the air of Morgan Hill. So we participated in the public process of siting that facility, and we expressed our concern,” Eulo said.
