Last year, a big battery in California caught fire, and became a PR problem for the energy storage industry. Then, a few weeks ago, it happened again.
On Jan. 16, 2025, the Vistra Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility, about 20 miles south of Monterey, burned for several days and distributed a fine layer of heavy metals across the landscape. Today, a cleanup of the facility is ongoing as long-term health and ecological impacts remain uncertain.
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Regrettably, that was not the end of it.
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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Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are rapidly becoming key components of clean energy grids across the world. Recent data shows that BESS units are now cheaper than natural gas peaking plants for meeting demand during peak day crunches, which typically fall during the hottest days of summer in most locations across the US.
Utility Dive reported last week that “the levelized cost of electricity for four-hour battery storage is now cheaper than gas peakers in markets across the globe”. Based on a Wood Mackenzie analysis, the report reaffirmed that gas generators are in a supply crunch, back ordered for several years into the future -“driven by data centre load growth, a dynamic that keeps thermal capital costs elevated and reinforces the long-term economic case for renewables and storage.” Previously, Utility Dive had reported that the supply crunch threatened to raise the price of new Combined Cycle Gas Turbines by up to 195 percent.
The Wood-Mackenzie report stated that “4-hour battery storage is 65% to 75% cheaper than new open-cycle gas turbine peakers, depending on whether state-level carbon pricing applies.”
That said, there is still the same kind of resistance to BESS siting across the country as exists for solar and wind projects, although I would argue slightly less intense. BESS tends to be generally a smaller footprint, meaning fewer landowners are going to be adjacent to, or perceive themselves as affected by the facility.
One of the leading concerns expressed is fire, and while there is a history to support those concerns, the technology has a demonstrated track record of massive improvements.
California’s Moss Landing Battery storage facility has been a black eye for the industry. but fortunately, it’s also an indicator of how far the industry has come in terms of safety and reliability for BESS units over the last decade.
The story of the last 10 years for batteries has been of rapid transition from early Nickel Manganese Cobalt batteries, which did have a propensity to burn if not properly handled, to the much more stable Lithium Iron Phosphate technology, which is now the standard. Data from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) supports the claim that safety and reliability have improved dramatically.
According to EPRI, “The annual failure rate in terms of failures per deployed GWh has decreased by 98% between 2018 and 2025.” (new analysis here)
One good example is the case of Galaxy Note7 cell phones, which a decade ago were specifically banned from all air transport by the US Department of Transportation, specifically because of their unfortunate tendency to burn spontaneously.
While such mishaps still happen, flight crews are well equipped and trained to handle them, and the incidence rate is so low that no particular brands, to my knowledge, are currently banned.
Just like no one is going to build a nuclear plant that looks like Chernobyl anymore, engineers have learned a lot from past mistakes about battery safety, with changes not only to chemistry, but also to floorpans and layouts of facilities that make failures much less likely going forward.