Smoke rises throughout a fireplace at Vistra Power’s Moss Touchdown battery storage facility in California on 17 January
Bloomberg / Getty Photos
A fireplace on the world’s largest battery storage plant in California destroyed 300 megawatts of power storage, pressured 1200 space residents to evacuate and launched smoke plumes that would pose a well being risk to people and wildlife. The incident knocked out 2 per cent of California’s power storage capability, which the state depends on as a part of its transition to make use of extra renewable energy and fewer fossil fuels.
The fireplace began the afternoon of 16 January, burning by a concrete constructing filled with lithium batteries on the Moss Touchdown Power Storage Facility in Monterey county, California. Different buildings on the location, together with extra battery storage services and a pure gasoline plant, weren’t affected. By the morning of 17 January, native officers reported minimal flames and smoke.
“That is actually much more than a fireplace, it’s a wake-up name for this trade,” mentioned Glenn Church, a member of Monterey county’s board of supervisors, throughout a press convention. “If we’re going to be transferring ahead with sustainable power, we’d like a protected battery system in place.” After the press convention on the morning of 17 January, the blaze flared up once more that afternoon, resulting in an extension of the evacuation order.
As a result of lithium fires burn at excessive temperatures and emit poisonous substances comparable to hydrogen fluoride, firefighters let such a blaze burn itself out quite than partaking with it straight. There have been no stories of accidents related to the fireplace, and air monitor methods didn’t detect any indicators of hydrogen fluoride. However the smoke plumes from the fireplace are more likely to have contained heavy metals and PFAS, higher often called eternally chemical substances, says Dustin Mulvaney at San Jose State College in California.
Native officers are presently advising residents of Monterey county to remain indoors and hold their doorways and home windows closed. Inhaled heavy metals and PFAS might pose a well being threat to space residents and farm staff. These substances might additionally impression wildlife comparable to the ocean otters that reside within the wetlands of the close by Elkhorn Slough salt marsh, says Mulvaney.
The destroyed constructing was one in every of two Moss Touchdown battery services owned by the Texas-based firm Vistra Power. Its services beforehand skilled much less severe incidents that concerned overheating batteries and malfunctions within the fireplace suppression system. However the facility that went up in flames this week has a water-based suppression system and it’s unclear why it failed, mentioned Vistra Power officers through the press convention. They’re nonetheless investigating the foundation reason for the fireplace.
Regardless of this incident, utility-scale battery methods for electrical energy grids have skilled a 97 per cent drop in failures worldwide – which are sometimes fire-related – between 2018 and 2023, in keeping with a report by the Electrical Energy Analysis Institute, a non-profit organisation based mostly in Washington DC.
“This huge lower has been noticed regardless of the truth that deployments of utility-scale storage proceed to extend at excessive charges,” says Maria Chavez on the Union of Involved Scientists. “Battery storage methods are designed with a number of ranges of security options that goal to forestall and mitigate points like fireplace threat – sadly, accidents just like the one at Moss Touchdown facility can nonetheless happen.”
California can also be higher ready than most US states to answer such incidents: it has a state legislation requiring native governments to develop emergency response plans with battery builders, says Mulvaney. He described the necessity to study from occasions like this in designing future battery storage methods.
However the lack of most or the entire 300-megawatt facility at Moss Touchdown will put a severe dent in Vistra Power’s general 750-megawatt on-site power storage capability, and California’s whole 13,300-megawatt power storage capability.
Moss Touchdown has been serving the state’s electrical energy grid by storing renewable power and decreasing dependence on fossil fuels comparable to pure gasoline crops, says Mulvaney. Reconstruction and constructing again battery capability might take a number of years – a giant ask, contemplating California is already going through the necessity for in depth rebuilding elsewhere as a result of Los Angeles wildfires.
“We will’t have battery fires like this,” says Mulvaney. “We will’t lose 300 megawatts of batteries in a single day like this.”
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