The California Energy Commission approved a request to increase the output of a Burbank gas-fired power plant to address grid reliability issues, prompting some organizations and locals to protest out of concern about the facility’s emissions and costs.
The CEC during its Nov. 17 business meeting granted about $36 million to the City of Burbank to refurbish the Magnolia Power Plant’s (MPP) compressor system for about $23.2 million and add a new gas path system for about $12.8 million.
The project would increase MPP’s capacity by 54 MW to make up for lost output stemming from degradation at the plant, a CEC resolution says. MPP’s added capacity will be available during extreme events for five years from the commercial online date.
The increased capacity was needed due to tight grid conditions in California over recent years, CEC Vice Chair Siva Gunda said at the meeting.
“[We’ve] had to throw everything on the table to keep the lights on,” Gunda said. “That meant basically turning on every backup generator in the state, like diesel backup generators, and unhooking large marine vessels from shore power and running them on bunker fuel.”
The CEC’s docket for the MPP project contained letters from nearby residents asking the commission to reject the facility’s renovation plan.
“Investing more money into an aging gas plant risks stranded assets — infrastructure that soon becomes unusable but still costs ratepayers,” wrote Suzanne York of Pasadena to the CEC on Nov. 14.
Gunda said that it is “really important for us to acknowledge the comments that were made by many of the community members.”
“Please don’t stop pushing back because … the next choice will be influenced by the comments you all make.”
The renovated MPP facility will operate with fewer environmental impacts than a peaker plant, Mandip Samra, general manager of Burbank Water and Power, said in a Nov. 14 letter to the CEC. Renovating MPP is also more cost effective than constructing a new facility, she added.
The CEC certified MPP in 2003, and the facility began operations in 2005. MPP is owned by the Southern California Public Power Authority (SCPPA) and operated by the City of Burbank and Burbank Water and Power.
The project’s funding is part of the CEC’s Distributed Electricity Backup Assets (DEBA) program, which provides incentives for constructing cleaner and more efficient distributed energy assets to strengthen electricity reliability, the commission said in its resolution.
At this point, the CEC has approved all natural gas efficiency improvement projects presented in the DEBA’s notice of proposed awards, a CEC spokesperson told RTO Insider in an email. The facility will never go beyond its nameplate capacity or what was originally certified for its output, the spokesperson wrote.
The CEC has approved two similar projects in recent years: the Lodi Energy Center in March 2025 and the Roseville State Power Augmentation Project with the City of Roseville in August 2024.
