I bet you do. I'm talking about when the world's largest lithium-ion battery storage plant - the Vistra Energy facility - in beautiful Moss Landing, California, lit off.
Lemme take you back to the 17th of this month for a quick refresher.
...As of 11 pm last night, 1500 residents had been evacuated, roads in the area were closed, including iconic Highway 1, and fire crews were still waiting this morning for the fire to burn itself out.
Flames continued to spew early Friday morning in the community of Moss Landing and the Elkhorn Slough area in northern Monterey County after a major fire at a battery storage plant that brought evacuations.
The fire closed Highway 1 and raged out of control Thursday night, sending up huge flames and clouds of hazardous black smoke. It was reported around 3 p.m. at the plant, located on Highway 1, Monterey County spokesman Nicholas Pasculli said....
THERE ARE A LOT OF BATTERIES IN THERE
...“It’s a major incident,” he said. “All the resources in the county and our neighboring jurisdictions have been deployed to assist with this incident.”
The facility, owned by Vistra Energy, a Texas company, is one of the largest battery storage plants in the world. It holds tens of thousands of lithium batteries, which are used to store electricity from solar power and other sources generated during the day for use at night. Such battery storage plants are a key part of California’s efforts to shift most of its electricity generation to renewable sources.
“There’s no way to sugarcoat it. This is a disaster, is what it is,” Monterey County Supervisor Glen Church told KSBW-TV. “This is extremely disconcerting.”
The plant is located in Monterey, about 320 miles north of Los Angeles, a supremely beautiful part of the CA coastline and ecologically sensitive in every regard.
Sounds like the perfect place to plop a massive battery storage plant, no?
What it did before the fire was store the excess energy from CA's solar fields for when the grid became unstable and needed extra power available. It had recently gotten a 15-year contract to pick up Pacific Gas and Electric shortages and had the capacity to provide up to four hours of backup juice to the PG&E grid.
Smoke pours from a smoldering fire at Vistra Corp.’s Moss Landing battery storage facility in Moss Landing, California, US, on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025. A fire broke out at Vistra Corp.’s Moss Landing complex in California, one of the world’s biggest battery storage facilities,… pic.twitter.com/fSKXcdPXXa
— Jordan Caballero (@jordancaballero) January 19, 2025
That is also now gone.
Residents in the Moss Landing area are furious. The anger they expressed in interviews just a few days after being trapped in their homes, sealed up as best they could for days after the fire due to the fumes and ash, was palpable.
..."It is a charred, stinking mess. And it is just, and it's poison now. Okay? We've been poisoned," said Patricia Yeargin, who has a clear view of the Moss Landing towers from her front porch.
"They're telling us to wear masks. They're telling us to go inside our house and not come out. They're telling us they have to, uproot us from our, neighborhoods," Yeargin said. "And we need to be taken someplace till this thing gets less toxic, for people. So we know what it's doing to our water down there. We know what it's doing to our animals."
..."I think to myself 'Do I want to leave?' When can I get back? How much traffic is there going to be? Because all the roads are closed.' We just stayed put. Hunker down," said Elkhorn resident Christine Teraji. "The next morning, I wanted to know what's how dangerous. Well, we check in. The EPA takes a long time. You know, it's like three days go by."
And they are tired of the constant, deadly fire drills.
...This is the fourth time Yeargin has been asked to evacuate in recent years due to lithium-battery fires in Moss Landing. Now she is demanding change.
Residents are also getting pretty fed up with the lack of answers coming from the plant operators, the utility, and their elected officials.
It seems no one has anything to say to these people. So they've got a grassroots organization started that is pulling soil samples, etc, from a wide swath of the area and sending them out for independent testing.
GlobalTrvl sent me a note this morning that, sadly, shouldn't surprise anyone but ought to piss everyone off.
You remember waaaaaay back 12 days ago when a fire broke out at the world’s largest lithium battery facility in central California?
— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) January 29, 2025
The one that is surrounded by acres upon acres of farmland that feeds the nation?
Guess what? https://t.co/uyHt7UdYCA pic.twitter.com/xomjs0ivqP
San José State University has been monitoring the local ecologically rich but environmentally sensitive Elkhorn Slough estuary by Moss Landing for years, and when they came back for routine testing after the fire, the team found alarming results.
Research scientists at San José State University's Moss Landing Marine Laboratories said they have detected "unusually high concentrations of heavy-metal nanoparticles in marsh soils at Elkhorn Slough Reserve" after the Moss Landing battery facility fire on Jan. 16.
Dr. Ivano Aiello, who is the professor and Chair of San José State University's Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and his team have monitored marsh soil properties as part of a program for the Elkhorn Slough estuary. In the last two years, they have been testing for chemicals.
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.
"This dramatic increase relates to both the shallow subsurface and the baseline measurements conducted in the area before the fire. Samples of the heavy metal layer were examined at high magnification, and it was revealed that these metals are contained in nanoparticles that range in diameter between about 1 and 20 microns," said a representative from San Jose State.
The nanoparticles are used in cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries, making a clear connection between the increase in heavy metals in the soil and the battery facility fire.
The estuary feeds into the absolutely stunning natural marvel that is Monterey Bay.
Yup. I go kayaking there sometimes.
— Michael Oxford - AKA The Santa Cruz Mountain Goat (@SCMountainGoat) January 18, 2025
YAY, GREEN ENERGY
The solar and battery storage industry is doing some of the damnedest CYA tap dancing I have ever seen.
OH, DON'T WORRY COUGHING PEOPLE! THAT WAS AN OLD FACTORY
Seriously - that's their line. A 2020 storage plant is 'outdated' - the 'new' is much better 'newer' than the not-so-old 'new.'
Everything they build now is really, really good - trust them.
...On Wednesday, three state legislators representing the coastal area affected by the fire asked the state’s utility regulators “for a fully transparent and independent investigation, updated safety enforcement, prevention enhancements, and for the Vistra BESS to remain offline until safety is guaranteed.”
In the meantime, concerned residents staring down battery plants in other parts of the country can take some solace in the fact that Vistra’s Moss Landing facility was one of a kind, conceived and designed before modern safety standards were adopted for large grid batteries. Battery safety standards have been updated multiple times since it was built.
It may sound counterintuitive to think of a storage plant completed in 2020 as outdated. But the grid battery industry has evolved at a rapid pace since then — it’s now the second-biggest source of new U.S. grid capacity, behind solar power.
...In this case, the lack of exact copycats is very good news: It means that the design elements that allowed Moss Landing to burn so apocalyptically are not present in newer or forthcoming battery plants. The bad news is that a handful of other battery projects built around the same time as Moss Landing are slated to operate for years to come.
WHUT
Residents want the thing gone permanently. They're over it.
Monterey County Supervisors, on the other hand, dutifully took their beating from the public this week at their first meeting since the fire.
The supervisors are asking politely for a complete and thorough explanation of what the hell went wrong and for the utility to keep the thing shut down until they figure out what it was. They do, however, sound resigned to the fact that - I guess - regulatory statutes take those decisions out of their hands.
The Monterey County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to enact a proclamation of local emergency related to the Vistra Energy fire at the Moss Landing Power Plant that started Jan. 16, causing a large fire that burned lithium batteries, sent smoke and potentially fumes into the air and resulted in in an evacuation and road closures for the Moss Landing area.
...During the meeting, Church made a motion for the Board of Supervisors to write a letter to Vistra and PG&E, requesting both plants will stay offline until the investigation is complete.
“I know we can’t control it, but it’s a request,” Church said. “Neither plant be turned back to the power grid until the incident cause is known and they are in compliance with SB 38.”
According to another Xweet GT sent me, there are going to be a lot of communities in CA running up against this same problem, thanks to how Gov Randall Flagg-lite and his toadie legislators have stripped local control over renewables projects from them and given it to the state.
Gov. Newsom signed legislation taking away local control from communities to approve or deny battery storage facilities.
— Will O'Neill (@RealWillONeill) January 29, 2025
Now, his appointees on the California Energy Commission get to force these projects on communities like San Juan Capistrano and Laguna Niguel.
There… https://t.co/zjhSsjpcdI
...Now, his appointees on the California Energy Commission get to force these projects on communities like San Juan Capistrano and Laguna Niguel.
There shouldn’t be a single person within 20 miles of that project that should vote for another Democrat.
I mean, God DANG.
Isn't living in Blue Fascist Paradise hell?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member