The burned remains of the Moss Landing Power Plant battery energy storage facility caught fire again Friday morning, prompting Monterey County officials to issue a shelter in place order — less than two years after it became one of the largest battery storage facility fires in history.
Workers for Vistra, the plant’s Texas-based operator, noticed a flare-up early Friday morning against the wall of a building that burned in the initial January 2025 fire. The cause: roughly 1,200 inaccessible battery modules, still charged, spontaneously ignited, said Chief Jess Cortez with the North County Fire Protection District.
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“They’re in the smoldering stage right now,” Cortez said at a briefing Friday afternoon, adding that at that point there was no active fire. “The incident is very dynamic. There could be possible flare-ups.”
Local authorities lifted the order to shelter in place later Friday afternoon. Still, the flare-up reignites fears about battery storage facilities — even as California comes to increasingly rely on them. The state now has “the nation’s largest battery energy storage fleet,” the California Energy Commission announced in August.
“If we had only known the worst-case scenarios of how not to build batteries, we wouldn’t have built Moss Landing,” said Dustin Mulvaney, a professor at San Jose State University in the school of planning, policy and environmental studies. “Because it keeps coming back to haunt us.”
The incident also sharpens the tension between Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push to shortcut permitting for energy and other projects, and the communities hosting these facilities.
Fire, rekindled
In January 2025, residents watched large plumes of smoke and ash spewing from Vistra’s 300-megawatt battery energy storage facility at the Moss Landing Power Plant in Monterey County.
It was the facility’s fourth safety incident, the third on the Vistra property, since 2019, according to a letter Assemblymember Dawn Addis, a San Luis Obispo Democrat, sent state regulators last year. The fire continued for days before crews could control it, then rekindled briefly a month later.
Newsom called for a state investigation. The California Public Utilities Commission began with a site visit that month.
It isn’t bad enough that mining lithium is very toxic, it isn’t bad enough that conversion to battery grade material is toxic, it isn’t bad enough that there are no secure and environmentally safe recycling available, and it isn’t bad enough that the Democrats have never taken a hard look at all these problems.
What do they do? Oh we’ll look into it and in the mean time every thing is fine.
HUH?
Did you know to be fire safe to put a recharging unit in your house or apartment and then park your lithium powered car there it has to have a cinder block enclosure and in most communities cannot have any living spaces above it?
Are you voting Dem? Why? Laugh.
To think they want everyone to drive electric vehicles. Sounds great on paper and I am sure they have plenty of stock in the various companies but until they work out major problems as pointed out by “Really”, they need to come to grips that their ideas usually suck. Climate change, progressives always cry we need to be environmentally watchful and yet they destroy everything they touch. No answers just creating problems while spending tons of money. They also have a carbon footprint the size of the state of Texas with all of their jet setting with only one individual and the flight crew onboard their private jet.