A massive fire that destroyed much of a huge battery storage facility in Moss Landing raised questions, and possible new hurdles, Friday for California’s efforts to shift most of its electricity generation to renewable energy such as solar and wind.
The dramatic fire at the Vistra battery storage plant caused the evacuation of 1,200 people in Northern Monterey County, closed Highway 1 and sent large clouds of toxic black smoke billowing from one of the world’s largest battery storage plants.
Angry local officials said Friday that they had been misled by Vistra, a Texas-based energy giant that built the 750-megawatt plant in 2020, with one local official likening the blaze to a 1979 accident at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant that raised doubts about the safety of nuclear energy.
“This is really a Three Mile Island event for this industry,” said Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church. “If renewable energy is going to be the future, it really needs to be safe energy. There’s got to be lessons learned from this. There really needs to be a full independent investigation of what’s happened here.”
The plant, across from Moss Landing Harbor on the site of a former PG&E power plant that was built in the 1950s, holds tens of thousands of lithium batteries. Fire crews did not engage with the fire, which was contained to the site, but were letting it burn out on its own. It continued to flare through the day. Evacuations were lifted at about 6 p.m. Friday night.
Bruce Thomas, who lives on a boat in Moss Landing, declined to evacuate but said the fire has made him reconsider living near the power plant.
“You can’t be doing this to human beings, having three fires and going, ‘Oh well, they’re only Moss Landers,’ ” Thomas said.
Lithium battery fires are notoriously difficult to extinguish. They burn at high temperatures and can emit toxic gases that can cause respiratory problems, skin burns and eye irritation.
Joel Mendoza, chief of the North Monterey County Fire Department, said Vistra’s fire suppression system, which had worked in prior situations, wasn’t sufficient, and the fire overtook the system. He said that air quality monitors set up by officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had not detected hydrogen fluoride gas, one of the main hazardous materials that can come from burning batteries.
Such gasses, along with soot and most of the harmful emissions from the batteries, appear to have quickly drifted to higher elevations, said Richard Stedman, executive officer of the Monterey Bay Air Resources District.
“”The plume was at least 1,000 feet high,” he said Friday. “We’re not expecting it to impact people on the ground.”
Battery storage is key for enabling California’s expanded use of solar and wind energy.
Because the sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind doesn’t blow all the time, California has been increasingly relying on huge battery storage plants to capture electricity during the daytime and release it on the grid at night, reducing the risk of blackouts during hot summer months when demand is high.
“The situation playing out right now in Moss Landing has been the concern of our community for the past few years,” said Morro Bay Mayor Carla Wixom on Friday. “People are worried about a fire and the consequences of it. We have a high school right across the street from there, and only one way in and one way out.”
Battery storage has increased sevenfold in the past five years in California, from 1,474 megawatts in 2020 to 10,383 megawatts by mid-2024, according to the California Energy Commission. A megawatt is enough electricity to run 750 homes.
Since 2020, companies in California have built more large-scale battery storage projects than any place in the world except China. Five years ago there were 36 such plants in the state. By 2024 there were 175, with dozens more planned or under construction.
But the plants have had fires and increasingly are raising concerns from local officials in communities where they are proposed.
After Vistra proposed building a 600-megawatt battery storage plant on the waterfront at a former PG&E plant site in Morro Bay in San Luis Obispo County, opponents put a measure on the ballot to block it. It passed in November with 60%.
Wixom said she and many others in Morro Bay support renewable energy and battery storage. But she said it would be more appropriate to be built next to giant solar farms in rural places.
Last summer, after two fires occurred at San Diego County battery storage facilities, San Diego County supervisors required county officials to draw up tighter rules that would restrict battery storage plants near homes, schools and other facilities.
Mark Jacobson, a professor of environmental engineering at Stanford University, said fires at battery plants are rare. By helping the state’s renewable energy keep growing, they are reducing the amount of electricity generated from natural gas, which in turn reduces soot and smog, he said.
“I don’t consider this a disaster. San Bruno was a disaster,” Jacobson said, citing the explosion of a PG&E natural gas pipeline in 2010 that killed 8 people and destroyed 37 homes in a San Mateo County neighborhood.
Jacobson said the battery storage industry needs to do a better job explaining to the public the safety systems in its facilities and how they work. But all forms of energy storage and generation have risk, he said.
Emergency officials said Friday they don’t know how the fire started. Three smaller fires have broken out since 2019 at the Vistra plant and an adjacent PG&E battery storage plant, which was not damaged.
“Our company takes very seriously what happened last night and we are hurting today because we know primarily it’s impacted and disrupted the people who live around our site — our neighbors, our friends and businesses — and for that we’re sincerely sorry,” said Vistra spokesman
.
State Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, wrote a law after other fires on the site that requires battery plant operators to develop emergency response and evacuation plans.
“We really need battery storage,” Laird said. “But we really need to have everyone safe.”
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