Moss Landing battery fire: don’t waste a good crisis?

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Moss Landing battery fire: don’t waste a good crisis?

January 22, 2025

With all of the focus on CO2 it's easy to forget there are a lot of other, way more dangerous pollutants being released during emergencies. The Moss Landing lithium-ion fire adds hydrogen fluoride to the list. Where's my college chemistry book when I need it? The various wildfires over the last four years have spewed mega tons of particulate matter ("smoke") and who knows what else from burning cars, houses and businesses. But all the Sacramento and local government focus has been on our cars, stove tops, BBQs and water heaters.

Only now is our camera hound governor is calling for an investigation into the massive Moss Landing battery plant fire even though it is either the fourth or fifth fire there in the last four years.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A fire at the world’s largest battery storage plant in Northern California smoldered Friday after sending plumes of toxic smoke into the atmosphere, leading to the evacuation of up to 1,500 people. The blaze also shook up the young battery storage industry.

The fire at the Vistra Energy lithium battery plant in Moss Landing generated huge flames and significant amounts of smoke Thursday but had diminished significantly by Friday, Fire Chief Joel Mendoza of the North County Fire Protection District of Monterey County said.

Brad Watson, Vistra’s senior director of community affairs, said two “overheating events” happened at the battery plant in 2021 and 2022 because the batteries got wet. A third incident happened in 2022 in the neighboring Elkhorn battery plant that is owned by PG&E, he said.

I'm all for huge, grid-based battery storage. We need it if we have any hope for stability

California was an early adopter of battery storage and leads the nation with more than 11 gigawatts of utility-scale storage online, which can meet nearly half of the demand on the state’s main grid for four hours per day.

But like first-generation EV chargers that fail regularly, the devil is in the details. As Rahm Emanuel said "you never want a good crisis go to waste". That's the order of the day.

Battery investigation

Posted in Climate, Power (Electricity, Gas), State Ievel issues

4 responses to “Moss Landing battery fire: don’t waste a good crisis?”

Joe

January 27, 2025

The bad news continues to dribble out:
Moss Landing battery fire: Unusually high concentrations of toxic metals found in wetlands near plant
Nickel, cobalt and manganese, found in lithium-ion batteries, increased dramatically at Elkhorn Slough after the fire (roughly a mile away)
“Those three metals are toxic,” said Ivano Aiello, a marine geology professor at Moss Landing Marine Labs, who led the soils testing. “They are hazardous to aquatic life. We want to understand how they will move and interact with the environment, whether they will make it through the food web and at what level — from microbes to sea otters.”
“The concentrations went from tens of parts per million to thousands of parts per million — 2 to 3 orders of magnitude,” he said. “It’s a lot.”
Joe

February 19, 2025

Wow. A month later, another fire!
Residents urged to stay inside after another fire burns at Moss Landing battery facility
Light smoke and fire were seen at the plant late Tuesday
In an emergency alert on the Monterey County Warning System sent at 10:30 p.m., officials said light smoke and fire were coming from the Vistra Battery Facility. Officials said they were monitoring the air quality.
Authorities in the warning urged residents to stay indoors and close windows “out of an abundance of caution.”
Cassandra

February 19, 2025

Just as Russia influenced Germany to “Go Green” and ended up buying Russian oil, China is influential in getting us to rely on electricity that is so easily sabotaged.
Nuclear please.
Joe

September 4, 2025

Shipping our waste off the Nevada:
Tens of thousands of batteries that were damaged in a fire in January at one of the world’s largest battery storage plants in Moss Landing will be removed, treated and transferred to a recycling facility in Nevada starting Sept. 22, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday.
Two truckloads a day of the batteries will be driven 330 miles to the American Battery Technology Company in McCarran, Nevada, a facility in the desert about 15 miles east of Reno that conducts commercial-scale lithium-ion battery recycling.

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