Morro Bay Power Plant has been a landmark since 1950s. Here’s the story behind the stacks
In the mid-1950s, the Morro Bay Power Plant was the biggest private construction project that San Luis Obispo County had seen since a guy named William Randolph Hearst built a hilltop mansion up the coast.
Later it was eclipsed by the vastly larger Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant near Avila Beach.
In the 1950s, California’s population was exploding and utilities were in a desperate race to stay ahead of demand.
Morro Bay offered a perfect place to expand PG&E’s power grid. As one June 1955 Telegram-Tribune headline trumpeted, “Sandy Waste Becomes a Plant Site.”
Bechtel had between 438 and 700 builders working on the Morro Bay power plant, according to a May 15, 1954, story.
When PG&E dedicated the first units of its $44 million plant, local media coverage did not mention view sheds, air pollution, fish larvae or the California Coastal Commission.
To be fair, the Coastal Commission had not been invented yet, but the other aspects were not considered important at the time.
The utility did take the extra step of cladding the exterior of the Morro Bay plant with an aluminum skin as an aesthetic upgrade. Most of the 15 other steam plants in the system were open and industrial looking.
The tax base provided by the power plant helped launch the city of Morro Bay and consolidate schools in the Morro Bay, Los Osos and San Luis Obispo region into the larger San Luis Coastal Unified School District.
A smiling school district superintendent posed with a model of the stacks puffing dollar signs into the air.
The plant’s four units provided head-of household jobs during construction and operation. (Two shared a smokestack.)
A July 7, 1955, Telegram-Tribune special section said the plant was estimated to provide enough power to light a city the size of San Francisco.
The smoke stacks are 450 feet tall but there are an additional 68 feet of piles and concrete buried in the sand below to support them.
Telegram-Tribune photographer and reporter Fen Trubridge rode to the top of the stacks on a cable to take a vertigo-inducing photo. (Trubridge was a bit of a wild man; one story about him said he once fell into a wedding cake during the reception.)
In the late 1980s or early 1990s, the Los Osos Chamber of Commerce printed a flyer extolling the wonders of the region. The biggest photo was a beautiful panorama of the back bay with the sandspit and Morro Rock in the distance.
The stacks for the Morro Bay Power Plant were nowhere to be seen. Instead, a graphic artist pasted over where the smokestacks were and inserted a closeup of a gliding seagull.
That was a controversial decision because PG&E was a major chamber sponsor.
Four decades after construction, PG&E sold the then 41-year-old plant to Duke Energy in November 1997 as part of a California state requirement to break up monopoly power generation.
A Telegram-Tribune story written by Silas Lyons said the Morro Bay plant employed 84 people. Of those, 64 were members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
When it ran at full capacity, it generated 1,002 megawatts of electricity.
When the Morro Bay Power Plant was sold to Duke, it had an annual payroll of $7.5 million and paid $2.1 million in property taxes.
Unfortunately, the four-decade-old plant was not economically competitive with more modern technology.
In February 1999, Duke Power proposed knocking down one stack and replacing it with two shorter ones as part of a $225 million modernization. The proposal fizzled and the plant had various owners on its way to being decommissioned.
Current site owner Vistra Corp. plans to turn the facility into a 600-megawatt battery storage plant. If constructed, it would be the largest such facility in the world.
As part of its agreement with the city of Morro Bay, Vistra must tear down the Morro Bay Power Plant’s stacks and other structures by 2028, or pay the city $3 million.
The City Council will have the authority to determine the fate of whether the stacks remain after consideration of community input, which will be a “community decision,” city manager Scott Collins told The Tribune.
Both parties also pledged to participate in a “robust community conversation and engagement about the future of the (power plant) site, including informing City Council decision about whether or not the city should require Vistra to keep the ‘stacks,’ ” a city news release said.
Some people are sentimental about the stacks, while others would like to see them go.
What do you think? The Tribune wants to know.
