Fire at one of the world’s largest battery plants in California forces evacuations
MOSS LANDING, Calif. (AP) — Hundreds of people were ordered to evacuate and part of Highway 1 in Northern California was closed early Friday after a major fire erupted at one of the world’s largest battery storage plants.
The fire started Thursday afternoon and sent up towering flames and black smoke, and about 1,500 people were instructed to leave Moss Landing and the Elkhorn Slough area, [The Mercury News] reported.
The Moss Landing Power Plant, located about 77 miles south of San Francisco, is owned by Texas-based company Vistra Energy and contains tens of thousands of lithium batteries. The batteries are important for storing electricity from such renewable energy sources as solar energy, but if they go up in flames the blazes can be extremely difficult to put out.
Again? This is, what, the third or fourth time Moss Landing has had ‘issues’.
Both Phase I and II of the Vistra storage system at Moss Landing have been shut down since September 2021 and February 2022 respectively. The cause of both incidents was reportedly overheating batteries that activated the sprinkler systems. The company is further investigating and taking action to mitigate the possibility of similar future events.
And in September 2022…
Officials closed Highway 1 in both directions in Moss Landing early Tuesday morning after a fire was detected at the PG&E Elkhorn Battery Storage facility…The North County Fire Department and Monterey County Sheriff’s Office issued a shelter-in-place advisory Tuesday morning…
"When one of these battery packs are actually actively burning, we don’t do direct fire attack on it … we don’t try to put the fire itself out. We basically protect the exposures around it, protect the other battery packs.”…
Using water may not be a good idea, but it is all they have – millions of gallons of it.
"We’re preparing for the worst and making plans to be here for a long time, two to four weeks and will reevaluate then,” said Captain Brent Pascua with Cal Fire San Diego. “You have to put water on it to keep the fire confined, but that water damages the batteries also allowing them to arc starting another fire.”
Ever seen lithium (or sodium) in water? Instantly reactive. Part of the problem is that the reaction creates its own oxygen, so extinguishing it with a source fuel is problematic at best.
You have to hope you can cool it below the ignition point, hard to do once it’s already igniting, and hope you can douse it in enough water to put it out, again hard to do since water can be an ignition material. (If you get enough water to cool and starve it sometimes it will work, but often not and you just have to wait for it to put itself out. That’s why often the “solution” is to keep the nearby battery packs cool enough so they don’t also ignite, and just let the fire play itself out)
As noted above, there have been multiple ‘incidents’ in a few years time. This month there were over 7000 acres under evacuation with some 1200 people living there. At 640 acres per square mile, that’s over 11 square miles, a circle with a radius of about two miles.
Currently under consideration in New York City is a battery storage facility at the Moss Point power plant (on the East River opposite Roosevelt Island.
Ravenswood’s owner—private equity firm LS Power—has received approval from New York state to build 316 megawatts of battery storage on-site…
Hmm. 300+ MW of batteries neighboring a “dense housing project”. And if New York officials had to evacuate a two-mile radius circle, well that would probably involve a million people.
The immediate damage was quite limited, beyond the battery containers themselves. No injuries were reported from any of the fires, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), which plays a leading role in the state’s grid storage efforts… She [Gov. Kathy Hochul] is pushing to increase the state’s battery storage capacity from about 300 megawatts today to 6,000 megawatts in 2030…
First, on May 31, a battery that NextEra Energy Resources had installed at a substation in East Hampton caught fire… Then, on June 26, fire alarms went off at two battery units owned and operated by Convergent Energy and Power in Warwick, Orange County; one of those later caught fire. On July 27, a different Convergent battery at a solar farm in Chaumont caught fire and burned for four days straight.
I don’t understand why it’s so important to have the energy source right next to - or even within - the urban area where it’s to be used. We don’t put water reservoirs in the middle of a city, even though siting them far away has costs in construction and evaporation in transporting it to where the people are.
Why not put the electrical storage (and production for that matter) at some remove from population centers, and if there is a cost, we’ll ascribe it to “safety” and be done with it? It seems “safety” is the last priority on anybody’s list, and saving a nickel is first, until something horrendous happens and then everybody’s all “Oh, wow, we should have thought of that.”
A good question. The plants in NYC are peaker plants, used to supplement supply during high demand peaks. NYC suffers from ‘transmission congestion’ so locating peaker plants within the city helps relieve congestion during times of high demand.
Sometimes I think a lot of these types of projects (the not logically sited ones) are either vanity projects (with the requisite “campaign” contributions) by local politicians or patronage job projects by local pols.
Nobody is saying they should be located a few hundred miles upstate (where transmission would indeed be problematic), but there are plenty of less dense areas very close to the city (30 miles) where it would be better to locate those peaker battery storage plants.
Moss Landing has several storage installations. The one that caught fire is one of the older ones. The newer ones have better safety features. This video is educational:
Disaster at Moss Landing: The Risk of Battery Storage
On January 16, 2025, a massive fire erupted at the Moss Landing Battery Energy Storage Facility in California, the world’s largest of its kind. This video examines the events leading up to the fire, the design flaws that allowed it to spread, and why firefighters made the decision to let it burn.
I also compare this incident to other battery storage facility disasters, like the Otay Mesa fire, and discuss what it means for the future of clean energy storage. Are outdated designs putting communities at risk? What lessons can be learned to prevent the next disaster?
They are planning a lot of battery storage on Long Island where off-shore wind power would come ashore.
For example, from a 2021 NYSERDA report: “The Zero Emissions and OSW Studies both find that location-optimized battery storage will be necessary to cost-effectively address the renewable generation integration and avoid more substantial transmission upgrades. The OSW Study finds that avoiding major transmission upgrades requires the carefully planned colocation of 1,700 MW of battery storage at the substations in the New York City area and Long Island utilized for integrating OSW generation. The Zero Emissions Study optimizes the location-specific deployment of 3,000 MW of battery storage by 2030, of which1,600 MW would be deployed in New York City and Long Island. The study finds storage needs accelerate rapidly after 2035 as an emission-free grid needs to be achieved by 2040, with approximately 15,000 MW of battery storage projected state- wide by 2040, of which 7,300 MW would be located in New York City and Long Island.”
In the days following the Vistra Power Plant’s lithium-ion battery storage facility fire, a dramatic increase in marsh soil surface concentration of three heavy metals, Nickel, Manganese and Cobalt, was found. The field surveys were conducted within a radius of around two miles from the battery storage facility, per a San Jose State representative.
