A Little More About My Power Plants

My power plants were called “cogeneration” because they produced both electricity for sale to Southern California Edison, and refrigeration for two of the largest cold storage warehouses.  Blatant plug: Angelo Antoci and Sam Perricone, with U.S. Growers Cold Storage, are two of my closest friends.  Use them.  They are the best.  Federal Cold Storage was sold to a conglomerate—not the same thing.  When Sunlaw started, these two companies supplied over half the cold storage for the Los Angeles area, to give you an idea how much refrigeration my two plants provided.

That’s a lot of ice cream sandwiches.  In addition the plants produced around sixty megawatts—enough electricity for about sixty thousand homes.  The plants ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for almost fifteen years, with two weeks of maintenance shutdown per year.

We produced the electricity by burning natural gas, although we could burn diesel in an emergency but never had to.  Shows you how reliable our natural gas pipeline delivery system is.  When you think about it, it’s an amazing engineering achievement.  The electric grid is also an amazing engineering feat, but it’s in your face all the time in the form of utility poles and wires cluttering up the view.  The natural gas system is out of sight.

We burned the gas in jet engines made by General Electric that were adapted to make electricity instead of fly a plane.  We used the same engine as those used on Boeing 747s and other jumbo jets.

Not everyone knows that the air that comes in the front of a jet engine gets shot out the back of the engine really fast.  Even fewer people know that the air coming out of the engine is really hot—about twice as hot as your home oven on broil, and the air that comes out of a car engine.

This hot air has a lot of energy in it.  At Sunlaw’s power plants the heat was directed into a giant version of the radiator on your car.  This is called a heat recovery steam generator, because unlike your car, which needs the coolant to stay liquid, our plants made as much steam as possible.

The steam went several places, but mostly it was used to make more electricity, and some went to making refrigeration for the cold storage warehouses.

The electricity is made in a steam turbine generator.  Basically it’s the same steam generator that has been in use for over one hundred years.  The only difference is that the source of the steam is the waste heat from the jet engine.

The refrigeration also was made from the steam, from the waste heat of the jet engine.  Called absorption refrigeration, it is unlike the mechanical refrigeration process used by the refrigerator in your house, which uses a compressor.  It’s more or less the same kind of refrigerator used in motor homes that run on propane, except our refrigerator was four stories tall.

Limited partners included Prince and two of the Jackson Five brothers with whom I went to Fairfax High School.  The power plants were shut down and sold around 2002.