other assets of LS partners. In 2015, a transmission tower collapsed at the power plant, causing a major Monterey County area power outage. On December 31, 2016, Dynegy retired supercritical steam units 6 and 7 as they were no longer economically competitive. However, Dynegy continues to maintain the permit on these units. In February 2017, independent power producer Dynegy, Inc. announced that it may close the gas plant, due to market conditions resulting from a glut of wholesale electricity capacity in California making it difficult to operate profitably. By 2018, California had 7,000 MW of surplus generating capacity, but a similar amount (mostly ocean cooled) would be retired by 2021. The glut in electricity capacity is partially a result of policies which guarantee utilities like PG&E (a regulated monopoly) a return on investment for building new power plants, even when they are not needed. Independent power producers like Dynegy, on the other hand, do not have a guaranteed return on their investment. Power production has dropped considerably, reducing taxes paid to Monterey County. Grid connection The plant has power lines that connect it to Path 15, and interconnections like Path 26 and Path 66 that allow power to flow to far-away regions. The plant is also connected to local loads and the San Jose region by transmission lines. Gas units Both the supercritical units and the combined cycle units use once-through cooling. The supercritical units have a cooling requirement of per minute, and the combined cycle units a requirement of . Supercritical Steam Units 6 and 7 Units 6 and 7 used supercritical steam. These units were retired at the end of 2016. At the end of their life, units 6 and 7 were typically operated as peaking units when demand for electricity was highest. In 2016, the last year of operation, they only operated approximately 3% of the time. The generation process for units 6 and 7 starts with natural gas injected at one end of the boiler to be burned. Primary water is injected at the other end of the boiler to receive the heat produced. The gas simply comes from a natural gas pipeline, and combustion products go up the stack and into the atmosphere. Water has a much more complicated path, and consists of two distinct systems: coolant water and primary (steam-generating) water. Cooling water is pumped out of the Monterey Bay or the nearby Elkhorn