A fire at the world’s largest battery manufacturing facility sets back clean energy production

A fire at the world’s largest battery storage facility in California destroyed 300 megawatts of energy storage, forced the evacuation of 1,200 area residents and released plumes of smoke that could pose a threat to human and wildlife health. The incident disabled 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 broke out on the afternoon of January 16, burning through a concrete building filled with lithium batteries at the Moss Landing Energy Storage facility in Monterey County, California. Other buildings on the site, including multiple battery warehouses and a natural gas plant, were not affected. By 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,” he said Glenn Churchmember of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, during a news conference. “If we want to move forward with sustainable energy, we need a secure battery system.” After a press conference on the morning of January 17, the fire flared up again that afternoonleading to an extension of the evacuation order.

Because lithium fires burn at high temperatures and release toxic substances such as hydrogen fluoride, firefighters let this type of flame burn out on its own rather than directly engaging it. There were no reports of injuries related to the fire, and air monitoring systems did not detect any signs of hydrogen fluoride. But the smoke plumes from the fire likely contained heavy metals and PFAS, better known as forever chemicals, he says Dustin Mulvaney at San Jose State University in California.

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

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

Despite this incident, battery systems for power grids saw a 97 percent drop in failures worldwide — often fire-related — between 2018 and 2023, according to report by the Electric Power Research Institute, a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC.

“This massive reduction has been observed despite the fact that utility-scale storage applications continue to increase at high rates,” he says. Maria Chavez in the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Battery storage systems are designed with multiple levels of safety features aimed at preventing and mitigating problems such as 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 response plans with battery manufacturers, Mulvaney says. He described the need to learn from such events in the design of future battery storage systems.

But the loss of most or all of Moss Landing’s 300-megawatt facility will severely impact Vistra Energy’s total energy storage capacity of 750 megawatts onsite and California’s total of 13,300 megawatts energy storage capacity.

Moss Landing serves the state’s electric grid by storing renewable energy and reducing dependence on fossil fuels such as natural gas plants, Mulvaney says. Rebuilding and rebuilding the battery could take several years — a tall order, given that California already faces the need for extensive rebuilding elsewhere due to Wildfires in Los Angeles.

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