I'll clip some of the paragraphs, but people should really pay for journalism!

> Residents of Sun Valley and Pacoima breathe some of California’s worst air and suffer from asthma-related hospitalizations at rates far higher than most of the state. So when the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power revealed last month that its power plant had been leaking methane gas for at least three years, local outrage was loud and swift.

..

> City officials see Valley Generating Station as a critical tool for keeping the lights on when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing — at least until energy storage technologies are cheaper and more versatile.

> During the recent Labor Day weekend heat wave, Valley Generating Station and several coastal gas plants “were pretty much running 24/7,” helping the city avoid rolling blackouts, a DWP official told the agency’s board of commissioners.

> At the same meeting, DWP General Manager Marty Adams called Valley “an integral part of our power supply transformation.”

> “The people who live around Valley Generating Station, who breathe the air in that area of the city, which is subject also to other industrial facilities and other sources of pollutants — they are very much supporting the overall efforts to create a more sustainable and green power future,” Adams said. “And so as we often have to rely on Valley more during the course of our upgrades, we realize that the local folks are making somewhat of a sacrifice in support of the overall efforts of the city.”

..

> DWP staff first notified the public — and its own board of commissioners — about the methane leak in late August. Adams, the utility’s general manager, made the unexpected disclosure during a Tuesday morning board meeting, announcing that staff would be presenting information about “an issue of methane gas at Valley, and work that we’re doing to control methane.”

> The plant’s compressor units had been leaking gas “for the last couple years,” one staffer said. The utility had a plan in place to fix the compressors later in the year but decided to go public now because NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had detected the leak as part of a drone survey, and “their information is getting more publicized,” Adams told the board.

> “I apologize for catching everyone cold,” he said.

> Several board members were stunned. So were members of the public. The questions came fast: When did staff discover the leak? Why hadn’t they notified the public earlier? How much methane was leaking from the plant?

..

> There were comparisons to Southern California Gas Co.'s Aliso Canyon gas leak, which spewed record-setting amounts of methane into the air near L.A.'s Porter Ranch neighborhood in late 2015 and early 2016.

> In turned out the Valley leak was small compared to Aliso Canyon’s. At the next board meeting, staff presented slides showing the faulty compressors had been leaking methane — the main component of natural gas — at rates ranging from 168 to 367 kilograms per hour, Jet Propulsion Laboratory readings showed. At Aliso, the rate exceeded 50,000 kilograms per hour at times.

..

> Utility staff also said Jet Propulsion Laboratory researchers first detected a methane plume at the power plant in 2017 but didn’t alert DWP until more recent drone surveys showed the leak had worsened.

..

> DWP staff say the methane plume didn’t leave the power plant site. And recent tests by South Coast Air Quality Management District in the surrounding neighborhood found levels of methane and volatile organic compounds “within typical background levels.”