Fire at the world’s largest battery plant is a setback for clean energy

A fire at the world’s largest battery storage facility in California destroyed 300 megawatts of energy storage, forced 1,200 area residents to evacuate and released plumes of smoke that could pose a health threat to humans and wildlife. The incident knocked out 2 percent of California’s energy storage capacity, which the state relies on as part of its transition to using more renewable energy and less fossil fuels.

The fire started on the afternoon of January 16, burning through a concrete building full of lithium batteries at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in Monterey county, California. Other buildings on the site, including several battery storage facilities and a natural gas plant, were not affected. On the morning of January 17, local officials reported minimal flames and smoke.

“This is really much more than a fire, it’s a wake-up call for this industry,” Glenn Church, a member of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, said during a news conference. “If we are to move forward with sustainable energy, we need a safe battery system in place.” After the press conference on January 17 in the morning, the fire flared up again that afternoon, leading to an extension of the evacuation order.

Because lithium fires burn at high temperatures and emit toxic substances such as hydrogen fluoride, firefighters allow this type of fire to burn itself out rather than engage in it directly. There have been no reports of injuries related to the fire, and air monitoring systems detected no signs of hydrogen fluoride. But the smoke plumes from the fire likely contained heavy metals and PFAS, better known as forever chemicals, says Dustin Mulvaney of San Jose State University in California.

Local officials are currently advising Monterey County residents to stay indoors and keep their doors and windows closed. Inhaled heavy metals and PFAS can pose a health risk to the area’s residents and farm workers. These substances can also affect wildlife, such as the sea otters that live in the wetlands of the nearby Elkhorn Slough salt marsh, Mulvaney says.

The destroyed building was one of two Moss Landing battery facilities owned by Texas-based company Vistra Energy. Its facilities have previously experienced less serious incidents involving overheating batteries and fire suppression system malfunctions. But the plant that went up in flames this week has a water-based suppression system, and it’s unclear why it failed, Vistra Energy officials said during the news conference. They are still investigating the cause of the fire.

Despite this incident, utility-scale battery systems for the electric grid have seen a 97 percent drop in failures worldwide — which are often fire-related — between 2018 and 2023, according to a report by the Electric Power Research Institute, a non-profit organization based in Washington DC.

“This massive decline has been observed despite the fact that the deployment of utility-scale storage continues to increase at high rates,” says Maria Chavez of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Battery storage systems are designed with multiple levels of safety features aimed at preventing and mitigating issues like fire risk – unfortunately, accidents like the one at the Moss Landing facility can still happen.”

California is also better prepared than most U.S. states to respond to such incidents: it has a state law that requires local governments to develop emergency preparedness plans with battery developers, Mulvaney says. He described the need to learn from events like this when designing future battery storage systems.

But the loss of most or all of the 300 megawatt facility at Moss Landing would put a serious dent in Vistra Energy’s total 750 megawatt energy storage capacity at the site and California’s total 13,300 megawatt energy storage capacity.

Moss Landing has served the state’s power grid by storing renewable energy and reducing reliance on fossil fuels such as natural gas plants, Mulvaney said. Rebuilding and rebuilding battery capacity could take several years – a big ask as California already faces the need for extensive rebuilding elsewhere due to the wildfires in Los Angeles.

“We can’t have battery fires like this,” Mulvaney says. “We can’t lose 300 megawatt batteries overnight like this.”