For years, Los Angeles has told residents that it is carefully studying how to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. I know because I was part of that process.

I served on the advisory group for the Los Angeles 100% Renewable Energy Study, or LA100, representing Food & Water Watch. I went into that process believing we were helping Los Angeles seriously examine what a fossil-free electric system could look like.

What I saw made me much more skeptical.

Today, LADWP is using research from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to help justify rebuilding part of the Scattergood Generating Station as a roughly 330-megawatt combustion plant designed to initially burn a mixture of fossil gas and hydrogen. LADWP argues that noncombustion alternatives cannot provide the reliability Los Angeles needs.

But before Los Angeles spends hundreds of millions of dollars on another combustion plant, Angelenos should understand what was actually studied, and what was not.

The NREL Scattergood report contains an important disclaimer: It “has not received the external peer review that is required for all NREL published works.”

That alone should give policymakers pause. But the larger problem is how the alternatives were framed.

NREL examined transmission, and later tested a limited set of combinations centered on fuel cells paired with storage or demand response. The study says its scope was “limited solely to a comparison” of LADWP’s proposed plant with specified noncombustion alternatives. It did not ask the more important question: What could a coordinated portfolio of distributed resources across Los Angeles accomplish together?

In other words, where was the virtual power plant?

A virtual power plant, or VPP, connects thousands of resources already spread throughout a city: home and commercial batteries, rooftop solar, smart thermostats, electric vehicles, and appliances that can shift their electricity use. Software coordinates those resources so they can behave like a power plant without burning fuel. Yet the Scattergood study did not model such a system as an alternative to rebuilding the plant.

That distinction matters. Asking whether batteries alone can replace Scattergood, or whether demand response alone can replace it, is very different from asking what batteries, solar, flexible demand, efficiency, EVs and other distributed resources could accomplish together.

California already has proof that this approach can work at scale. The state’s Demand Side Grid Support program has assembled more than 1,000 megawatts of distributed capacity. Yet rather than build on that success, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration opposed continued funding, and California’s latest budget provides no additional money for the program next year.

We are starving the alternative and then claiming we have no alternative. I recognize that pattern because I saw an earlier version of it during LA100.

Look at who had a seat at the table. Representatives of Southern California Gas, Valero, Tesoro, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, and other business interests participated alongside environmental organizations. As an environmental advocate, I often felt badly outnumbered by institutions with powerful financial interests in the energy system we were supposedly reconsidering.

The imbalance was not only about who was there. It was about who was missing.

Where were the tribal representatives? Where was representation from people living next to the facilities whose futures we were discussing?

Where were the many environmental justice organizations representing communities that have spent generations breathing pollution from Los Angeles’ industrial infrastructure?

Those voices should have been central to a conversation about what Los Angeles’ energy future would look like.

There was another warning sign. LADWP retained a consulting team led by WorleyParsons to study repowering its coastal generating stations.

Worley was an engineering company deeply involved in fossil fuel infrastructure, including refineries and gas projects. The resulting recommendations supported rebuilding gas-fired generating units.

To those of us pushing Los Angeles away from combustion, it increasingly felt as if the question was not whether we needed another gas plant, but how to justify building one. Years later, we are still having essentially the same conversation.

The irony is that California has already demonstrated the power of the demand side during a genuine grid emergency. During the September 2022 heat wave, California’s electricity demand reached a record 51,426 megawatts. With rolling outages approaching, state officials sent an emergency alert asking Californians to reduce electricity use. Demand plunged within minutes, helping keep the lights on.

That was millions of people manually doing what a sophisticated VPP can help accomplish automatically.

This is why LADWP’s framing of the Scattergood decision matters so much.

Nobody serious about climate change is suggesting that Los Angeles gamble with grid reliability. We need electricity during heat waves, wildfires, and transmission failures. But reliability cannot become a magic word that ends the discussion.

If LADWP believes combustion is truly necessary, prove it. Model the alternative that environmental advocates have been asking for: a citywide portfolio that combines distributed batteries, rooftop solar, energy efficiency, flexible demand, EV charging, and vehicle-to-grid technology, along with strategically located storage and transmission improvements.

Determine how much Scattergood capacity remains necessary after those resources are optimized together. Then have the analysis independently peer-reviewed.

LADWP itself says distributed energy resources are part of Los Angeles’ clean-energy future. If they are important enough to promote individually, they are important enough to model collectively before committing Los Angeles to another generation of combustion infrastructure.

There is still time to ask the question that should have been asked from the beginning.

Not: How do we replace Scattergood with something that behaves like Scattergood?

But: How do we build an electric system that no longer needs Scattergood to behave this way at all?

Until Los Angeles answers that question, it cannot honestly say it has exhausted the alternatives.

It has only exhausted the alternatives it chose to study.

The opinions expressed here are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.