Category: Energy

From Save Our Heritage Organisation

In June of this year, we first alerted you to this issue and asked for your help. SDG&E has released new information about its proposed Golden Pacific Powerlink transmission project, including three alternative routes, and has announced a series of community open houses. This is an important opportunity to learn more, ask questions, and make your concerns known.

The Golden Pacific Powerlink is a proposed 150-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission corridor. extending from the Imperial Valley to Orange County. With an estimated cost of $1.62 billion, it would be SDG&E’s largest capital project and the longest 500-kilovolt transmission line in its service territory.

It is important to understand that these lines would simply transmit SDG&E’s power to Orange County and the Los Angeles area. They would provide no electricity to anywhere in San Diego County, yet SDG&E customers would shoulder part of the financial burden.

County Supes Approved Major Use Permit in September

By Jacob Aere / kpbs / October 22, 2026

San Diego County and developers of a solar and battery storage project in East County are facing a lawsuit alleging the project’s environmental review was insufficient.

The suit was filed in San Diego Superior Court last week. It focuses on the Starlight Solar project near the town of Boulevard. The county Board of Supervisors approved a major use permit for the development for last month.

The 588-acre project, which includes a solar farm and a 868 megawatt-hour battery energy storage system, has faced community pushback.

The suit, filed Oct. 15 by a group calling itself the Back Country Community Alliance for Responsible Development, was brought under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

From Voice of San Diego / Oct. 23, 2026

Ever since we broke the news that a huge data center might be built in downtown San Diego, local Democrats have been insisting its time to pump the breaks.

Thursday morning, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria posted a photo of himself signing an executive order that temporarily bans data centers on X.

“San Diego is putting clear rules in place before we allow data centers in our city,” he wrote.

San Diego Councilmembers Sean Elo-Rivera, Joe LaCava and Kent Lee gathered outside City Hall later that day announcing the proposal of a new city law that would place requirements on data centers built under their jurisdiction.

By Alysse Dodge / Fox5 – Yahoo News / October 22, 2026 

El Niño’s impacts are already being felt across the nation, including elevated sea levels and coastal flooding.

For example, Tropical Storm Rachel caused surf to overtop and breach the bulkhead protecting the Long Beach Peninsula on the weekend of October 11-12, collapsing part of one of the state’s oldest boardwalks and leaving eight buildings red-tagged as unsafe. The same storm severely flooded 15-20 blocks of Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula, prompting a local emergency declaration.

The East Coast is also being affected by the 2026-2027 El Niño, which the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration says has an 83% chance of being the strongest ever on record. New Jersey and New England coastal communities were flooded by a powerful nor’easter at the end of September.

After storms like these, the response is typically the same — rocks, sandbags and concrete are put on the beach under emergency permits. However, in most states, nothing ensures they ever come off.

The Surfrider Foundation released its annual State of the Beach report on Monday, which focuses on the negative impacts of emergency shoreline armoring.

Once a hard structure is in place, the beach is pinned in place, upland sand replenishment is cut off and erosion accelerates on neighboring properties, which creates a need for more armoring. In some states, temporary structures become permanent without any new permit.

By Debbie L. Sklar / Special to the OB Rag

Before San Diego had satellites, cellphones, or the internet, the Navy was sending messages across the Pacific from a small wireless station high on Point Loma.

The station used a Massie-type spark transmitter — primitive by modern standards but part of a revolutionary technology that allowed ships and shore stations to communicate without wires. It was placed in service on May 12, 1906.

Getting the equipment to Point Loma was an undertaking. According to the Naval History and Heritage Command, the transmitter was unloaded at San Diego’s Santa Fe wharf and hauled up the peninsula by horse-drawn wagon. The journey took nine hours, and the equipment was installed in a small building overlooking the ocean.

The station initially used the call sign TM. It was later assigned NPL, a call sign that remains associated with the Navy’s San Diego radio operations.

The new station helped extend the Navy’s communications network along the West Coast. Wireless allowed operators to exchange messages with ships at sea, reaching far beyond the limits of ordinary wired communications.

By Debbie L. Sklar / Special to the OB Rag

In 1855, a group of San Diegans began prospecting for coal on Point Loma.

The project was an ambitious one. The San Diego Coal Co. hoped to develop the deposit into a local source of fuel and a profitable business for its investors. A local coal supply also could have helped San Diego compete as a coaling station for steamships and potentially benefit from future railroad development.

The men behind the venture were associated with San Diego’s small Mormon community. Among them was Ephraim Green, a former member of the Mormon Battalion who later said he had noticed coal on Point Loma before leaving San Diego in 1847.

The story has acquired a mythology of its own. One version says the Mormon prospectors were acting on a “revelation” that coal could be found there. But the historical record tells a more complicated story.

Reports of possible coal deposits on Point Loma dated to at least 1849. In 1855, Green returned to California and told members of the Mormon colony at San Bernardino about the coal he remembered seeing on Point Loma. He eventually led interested men to the site.

The prospecting soon became a formal business.

The San Diego Coal Co. was formed in November 1855 by Green, H.C. Ladd, George Warren Sirrine and Seth Benjamin Tanner.

by Ernie McCray

I sat the other night
squirming in my seat
as a woman,
Tina Cordova,
a co-founder and executive director
of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium,
spoke about our country’s neglect
in respect
to protecting
people who suffered the effects
of the “Trinity Nuclear Test”
in New Mexico,
how since that day
in July, 1945,

A group of eight or ten of us

By Angelo Haynes

Activists from across San Diego and Riverside counties appeared this week at the county administrative building for a hearing on the Golden Pacific Power Link Project, a new proposed power line that would cross through San Diego County Districts 2 & 5. The project is planned to be a 500-kilovolt electric transmission line that would necessitate a new substation named “North of SONGS” (San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station)  to be built bordering Camp Pendleton in Orange county.

The proposed power lines would be suspended on towers that would be 200 feet tall, or 20 stories, starting with an existing substation near the southern border, south of the 8 in Imperial Valley. The total length of the line would span between 135-145 miles long and would cross through many sensitive habitats and established communities in north and east counties.

SDG&E states that the line is needed to strengthen the regional power network and maintain power effectiveness in compliance with future policy goals of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and the Calif Independent System Operator (CAISO). The CAISO is an independent transmission planning authority that manages the flow of electricity across 80% of California’s grid in addition to a part of Nevada’s grid.

Feds Want to Begin ‘Review’ of How California Manages Our Coast

By Tammy Murga / KPBS / August 11, 2026

Public hearings this week could influence the future of oil production, rocket launches and other federal industrial projects off California’s coast.

The Trump administration is evaluating the state’s Coastal Commission and other coastal agencies. Depending on the outcome, the state could lose its authority to review and regulate projects that involve the coastline.

Coastal leaders and environmentalists across California, including San Diego County, said the results of the federal government’s new review are already predetermined.

“The current federal administration is behaving in an unprecedented way, and they are very excited to advance offshore oil drilling and other types of projects off the California coast,” said Jennifer Savage, the Surfrider Foundation’s California policy manager.

A routine review that the Biden administration largely completed last year showed favorability with the agencies managing the coast, she said.

In May, however, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said California “has repeatedly and unfoundedly obstructed spaceport development in bad faith.”

Spaceport development could include construction of infrastructure for spacecraft to launch and land. The Coastal Commission had rejected a request last year from the U.S. Space Force to increase SpaceX rocket launches off California’s coast due to concerns over beach closures and environmental and noise impacts.

By Blanca Begert / LA Times / July 31, 2026

California hit a major milestone in May, generating more than half its electricity from the sun in what is believed to be a global first, according to an analysis of federal data.

“California has had a wealth of solar growth in the last five years,” said Abby Lestina, an analyst at Grid Status, a group that tracks electricity supply and demand in U.S. power markets but was not involved with the analysis. “It makes sense that they would reach this goal.”

It’s the first time a large-scale power system is known to have surpassed 50% solar for an entire month.

It’s also the second significant power record set by the state recently. For the first five months of 2026, California made more electricity from solar than from natural gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Burning natural gas has long been the dominant source of electricity in the state. This could be the first year that solar beats gas in California’s power mix.

California has been trending in this direction for years, but the boom in new battery storage around the state allows it to save solar power when it’s overabundant and use it when the sun goes down.