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People near the site of the disaster say they’re sick. But officials haven’t recognized any link between those symptoms and the fire.

People say they can still taste the metal from the Moss Landing fire. But no one in the local, state, or federal government is able to say why.
The story of Moss Landing got little attention compared to the scale of the disaster. On January 16 — days before Trump reentered office, and as fires continued to burn in and around Los Angeles, when tempers and attention spans were already strained — the Moss Landing Power Plant ignited. We still don’t know what caused the fire, but we do know a few crucial facts: Nearly all of the batteries at the 300 megawatt facility, one of the world’s largest, burned up in the fire, sending a colossal plume of black smoke soaring up from the site for days.
Two months after the blaze was extinguished, many people who live in the vicinity of Moss Landing, a couple hours south of San Francisco, say they’re still sick from the fire. Community organizers on the ground say the number of sick people is in the hundreds, at least. The symptoms range, but there are a few commonalities. Many report having bloody noses in the days immediately following the fire. In the long weeks that followed, they’ve had headaches that don’t respond to pain medications, rashes that resemble burns, and a recurring metallic taste in their mouths. They all say their symptoms go away if they leave their homes and go further away from the site. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and California state regulators have given the all clear.
I have spent weeks trying to get to the bottom of what happened at Moss Landing. I’ve interviewed people who lived in the area and say they’ve experienced breathing issues and other difficulties, many of whom have gathered on Facebook to share photos, stories, and symptoms. Others have offered testimony about these illnesses in public fora and town halls. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against Vistra, the company that runs Moss Landing, over the fire, citing these health issues. Vistra denies the existence of evidence proving pollution from the fire is making people sick, and told me in a statement that the company is “committed to doing everything we can to do right by our community.”
“Moss Landing is not only home to our facility, it’s home to our employees and neighbors,” the statement reads.
And yet, the people say, their symptoms persist. One of the people who told me about their condition is Sheryl Davidson, a former receptionist who lives in the rural nearby town of Prunedale. One of her joys used to be doing Medieval cultural re-enactments, but since the fire she’s been unable to participate.
“My nose just started bleeding. It was traumatic,” she told me. “And I had asthma, but my asthma was miniscule. My whole life, I just had an inhaler. But the inhaler wasn’t working.”
Davidson has other symptoms, including headaches. She says a lump also developed in her face beneath one of her eyes, of which she sent me photos. Despite concerns that something in the air from the fire may have made her sick, she hasn’t left her home, a house she’d lived in since she was a child.
Part of the reason: No one is telling her to leave.
Officials in Monterey County, where Moss Landing is located, acknowledged to me in a statement that they received reports from medical providers that local residents sought care for symptoms related to the battery fire. The EPA said on January 20 that air monitoring throughout the fire incident found no substantial releases of hydrogen fluoride, a fatal pollutant released from battery fires. Records indicate that EPA tested for the particulate matter as well, but there’s no evidence it monitored specifically for heavy metals in the air. Vistra told me it has been doing environmental observations since the incident and is sharing the results with regulators, but said in a statement that it “has not detected risks to public health at this time.”
Davidson may have stayed, but others have left Prunedale, including Brian Roeder, who remembers seeing the fire break out while at home and deciding to leave town with his wife and son out of an abundance of caution. When they got back days later, the fire had been put out. But Roeder told me his wife, who he said is immunocompromised, began reporting breathing issues shortly after they returned. His son started coughing, as well. They quickly left home again, and have been living out of short-term rental apartments far away from the battery plant for weeks.
“This community has been significantly damaged, and they are not coming in to help anybody,” Roeder told me. “There’s been behind the scenes efforts, there’s been some work, but nothing commensurate with the size of this disaster.”
“I know that L.A. caught on fire at the exact same time,” Roeder continued. “That was the huge focus for the state. I know that planes were going down and we had a change in administration. But the fact remains that we, here, cannot explain the absence of support for what is happening from the state. And there’s been a pronounced absence.”
Roeder also started a community organization called Never Again Moss Landing, which has been collecting its own samples of the environment in consultation with a professional lab. In doing so, Roeder became part of a broader effort in the U.S. to create public safeguards for battery storage technology in the wake of Moss Landing. Ground zero for this push is, fittingly, California, where the state Public Utility Commission has responded to the fire by requiring battery storage facility owners to make emergency response plans and adhere to modern fire codes for battery storage. 
Some Democratic lawmakers in California want to go further, empowering localities to be the final decisionmakers on whether storage projects get built, as opposed to state regulators. 
In some pockets of the U.S., this push for battery safety risks morphing into a threat to the energy transition. For my newsletter, The Fight, I’ve chronicled how towns and counties across the U.S., from New York City to rural Texas, are now banning battery storage, citing the Moss Landing fire and the fear another battery fire could happen in their backyards.
By many metrics, Moss Landing is an outlier. The Moss Landing facility was a giant field of batteries inside a former factory, essentially trapping all these combustible mini-bombs prone to “thermal runaway,” a phenomenon where rising heat from a fire leads to a chain reaction of chemical ignition, inside an insulated box. Concerns about thermal runaway are a reason why almost all battery storage today is installed in storage containers and with an appropriate distance between individual batteries.
But Moss Landing is also a crucial test case for the future of battery storage and public trust.
This morning, the renewables sector took a big stride towards attempting to calm the rage against battery storage. American Clean Power, the leading renewables trade group, released an analysis of 35 battery storage fires in the U.S. from 2012 through the end of last year. Many of the incidents involved “early-generation” battery tech, it said, adding that “improved safety measures, such as advanced thermal management, suppression systems, and containment enclosures, significantly reduc[ed] the likelihood of large-scale incidents.”
The analysis does not speculate as to what may have caused the fire at Moss Landing, simply noting investigations into the incident are ongoing. But at the same time, ACP released a new blueprint for safe battery storage development. In the blueprint, the association acknowledges that some of its recommendations — including a requirement that all battery storage facilities meet a new fire safety standard produced years after Moss Landing was commissioned — are aimed at “holistically addressing concerns generated by the Moss Landing Fire.”
Residents are deeply suspicious of the official assessments denying what, to them, are obvious health impacts. To be candid, I can’t blame them. It strains credulity to imagine a battery fire of this size and scope right next door to you somehow creating no pollution worthy of public concern.
“When you burn [batteries] it moves toxic chemicals into the air,” said Tracey Woodruff, a former EPA senior scientist and policy advisor specializing in chemical contamination of the environment, who now works at the University of California San Francisco. “If this is an uncontrolled burn, you can’t just say there isn’t going to be fallout from that or exposure to the population.”
There’s data making people afraid too. In late January, researchers at San Jose State University alerted the public that they’d discovered “unusually high concentrations of heavy-metal nanoparticles” and a “hundreds- to thousand-fold” increase in nickel, manganese, and cobalt — metals all present in Moss Landing’s batteries — in soil two miles from the power plant in the Elkhorn Slough Reserve, one of the state’s biggest estuaries. Exposure to these metals can cause serious health issues, some of which mirror the symptoms described by residents in the area who are sick.
Exposure to dust with heavy metals can be dangerous at even relatively low levels. A county health advisory shared with local medical professionals in February urged doctors to complete a comprehensive physical of anyone concerned about the impacts of the fire on their health. It noted that breathing or coming into direct skin contact with “heavy metal dusts and other particulate matter from smoke” can result in a metallic taste and difficulty breathing, as well as exacerbate underlying conditions like asthma.
Discovering the metals’ omnipresence in the Slough after the fire led Ivano Aiello, a researcher at SJSU who collected that data, to conclude that the contamination is probably more widespread than is publicly understood.
“I freaked out [after the study] because I was breathing the stuff. I was out there for days and I had no idea,” he told me. “Then I alerted the authorities … and they did their own investigation.”
Subsequent studies conducted by county and state environmental officials, including within the Elkhorn Slough, found no level of these heavy metals that they said could be conclusively tied to the fire. On March 19, farm advisors at the University of California Cooperative Extension undertook a “limited study” that found a “slight deposition of metals (copper and manganese) may have occurred in one agricultural field closest to the battery fire site,” but that the “concentration of metals measured were within normal ranges for all soil types evaluated.” Dole, the giant produce company, which has operations in the area, told me that on its end “no health impacts have been reported and no soil contamination has been detected as a result of the Moss Landing battery fire.”
But Roeder and many other members of the surrounding communities are worried there isn’t enough testing being done to find out whether contaminants entered the atmosphere, especially since air pollution is rarely spread evenly. Like Covid-19, the only way we will ever know the extent of the problem is with more testing, testing, testing.
Roeder is trying to do this work himself. On what he says is his own dime, he and other members of Never Again Moss Landing have collected dust samples across the region in consultation with a credentialed lab in the state, BioMax, which he told me reached out after the fire.
On Wednesday, a local NBC affiliate reported that Don Smith, a toxicologist at the University of California San Diego, confirmed elevated levels of nickel, cobalt, and manganese in the dust samples collected by Never Again Moss Landing. “There is reason to be concerned,” Smith told the TV station, adding that people living near the plant should wear masks regularly if they’re interacting with dust in their homes and be careful not to disturb soil in their yards. “Both manganese and, to a lesser extent, cobalt are known to be neurotoxins. And nickel, of course, is recognized as a carcinogen.” 
Frustratingly, though, there is no solid proof to date of a conclusive link between the illnesses and metal exposure — just a lot of people with symptoms, a study that hasn’t been replicated in other pieces of research, and samples collected by residents who are also involved in litigation against the company. Still, that’s a lot of evidence of a problem. Medical mysteries are also common in environmental catastrophes like the Flint water crisis and the infamous DuPont PFOA debacle in Parkersburg, West Virginia, in which obviously sick residents butted heads with regulators for years, demanding information and testing.
What’s next for Moss Landing? The three counties most impacted — Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito — just concluded a community health survey that solicited comments from potentially impacted residents and received more than 1,500 responses, according to figures I reviewed that were shared at a recent Monterey County public meeting. When that study is out, we’ll have a comprehensive view of the locations where the sick live to see where it lines up with the plume that emitted from Moss Landing.
Taking a wider view, any society that’s going to rely primarily on intermittent energy sources like solar and wind needs battery storage to keep the lights on. That will require winning the public’s trust in battery technology. The Moss Landing fire was bad, and over time risks becoming an East Palestine moment for the energy transition. But the lack of a loud, sizable government response to calm the nerves of people publicly claiming illness is likely to be even more damaging to the future of the battery sector.
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The state formerly led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum does not have a history of rejecting wind farms – which makes some recent difficulties especially noteworthy.
A wind farm in North Dakota – the former home of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum – is becoming a bellwether for the future of the sector in one of the most popular states for wind development.
At issue is Allete’s Longspur project, which would see 45 turbines span hundreds of acres in Morton County, west of Bismarck, the rural state’s most populous city.
Sited amid two already operating wind farms, the project will feed power not only to North Dakotans but also to Minnesotans, who, in the view of Allete, lack the style of open plains perfect for wind farms found in the Dakotas. Allete subsidiary Minnesota Power announced Longspur in August and is aiming to build and operate it by 2027, in time to qualify for clean electricity tax benefits under a hastened phase-out of the Inflation Reduction Act.
On paper, this sounds achievable. North Dakota is one of the nation’s largest producers of wind-generated power and not uncoincidentally boasts some of cheapest electricity in the country at a time when energy prices have become a potent political issue. Wind project rejections have happened, but they’ve been rare.
Yet last week, zoning officials in Morton County bucked the state’s wind-friendly reputation and voted to reject Longspur after more than an hour of testimony from rural residents who said they’d had enough wind development – and that officials should finish the job Donald Trump and Doug Burgum started.
Across the board, people who spoke were neighbors of existing wind projects and, if built, Longspur. It wasn’t that they didn’t want any wind turbines – or “windmills,” as they called them, echoing Trump’s nomenclature. But they didn’t want more of them. After hearing from the residents, zoning commission chair Jesse Kist came out against the project and suggested the county may have had enough wind development for now.
“I look at the area on this map and it is plum full of wind turbines, at this point,” Kist said, referencing a map where the project would be situated. “And we have a room full of people and we heard only from landowners, homeowners in opposition. Nobody in favor.”
This was a first for the county, zoning staff said, as public comment periods weren’t previously even considered necessary for a wind project. Opposition had never shown up like this before. This wasn’t lost on Andy Zachmeier, a county commissioner who also sits on the zoning panel, who confessed during the hearing that the county was approaching the point of overcrowding. “Sooner or later, when is too many enough?” he asked.
Zachmeier was ultimately one of the two officials on the commission to vote against rejecting Longspur. He told me he was looking to Burgum for a signal.
“The Green New Deal – I don’t have to like it but it’s there,” he said. “Governor Burgum is now our interior secretary. There’s been no press conferences by him telling the president to change the Green New Deal.” Zachmeier said it was not the county’s place to stop the project, but rather that it was up to the state government, a body Burgum once led. “That’s probably going to have to be a legislative question. There’s been nothing brought forward where the county can say, We’ve been inundated and we’ve had enough,” he told me.
The county commission oversees the zoning body, and on Wednesday, Zachmeier and his colleagues voted to deny Longspur’s rejection and requested that zoning officials reconsider whether the denial was a good idea, or even legally possible. Unlike at the hearing last week, landowners whose property includes the wind project area called for it to proceed, pointing to the monetary benefits its construction would provide them.
“We appreciate the strong support demonstrated by landowners at the recent Commission meeting,” Allete’s corporate communications director Amy Rutledge told me in an email. “This region of North Dakota combines exceptional wind resources, reliable electric transmission infrastructure, and a strong tradition of coexisting seamlessly with farming and ranching activities.”
I personally doubt that will be the end of Longspur’s problems before the zoning board, and I suspect this county will eventually restrict or even ban future wind projects. Morton County’s profile for renewables development is difficult, to say the least; Heatmap Pro’s modeling gives the county an opposition risk score of 92 because it’s a relatively affluent agricultural community with a proclivity for cultural conservatism – precisely the kind of bent that can be easily swayed by rhetoric from Trump and his appointees.
Morton County also has a proclivity for targeting advanced tech-focused industrial development. Not only have county officials instituted a moratorium on direct air capture facilities, they’ve also banned future data center and cryptocurrency mining projects.
Neighboring counties have also restricted some forms of wind energy infrastructure. McClean County to the north, for example, has instituted a mandatory wind turbine setback from the Missouri River, and Stark County to the west has a 2,000-foot property setback from homes and public buildings.
In other words, so goes Burgum, may go North Dakota? I suppose we’ll find out.
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Staten Island, New York – New York’s largest battery project, Swiftsure, is dead after fervent opposition from locals in what would’ve been its host community, Staten Island.
2. Barren County, Kentucky – Do you remember Wood Duck, the solar farm being fought by the National Park Service? Geenex, the solar developer, claims the Park Service has actually given it the all-clear.
3. Near Moss Landing, California – Two different communities near the now-infamous Moss Landing battery site are pressing for more restrictions on storage projects.
4. Navajo County, Arizona – If good news is what you’re seeking, this Arizona county just approved a large solar project, indicating this state still has sunny prospects for utility-scale development depending on where you go.
5. Gillespie County, Texas – Meanwhile out in Texas, this county is getting aggressive in its attempts to kill a battery storage project.
6. Clinton County, Iowa – This county just extended its moratorium on wind development until at least the end of the year as it drafts a restrictive ordinance.
A chat with with Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Johanna Bozuwa, executive director of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank that handles energy issues. This week, the Institute released a report calling for a “public option” to solve the offshore wind industry’s woes – literally. As in, the group believes an ombudsman agency akin to the Tennessee Valley Authority that takes equity stakes or at least partial ownership of offshore wind projects would mitigate investment risk, should a future Democratic president open the oceans back up for wind farms.
While I certainly found the idea novel and interesting, I had some questions about how a public office standing up wind farms would function, and how to get federal support for such an effort post-Trump. So I phoned up Johanna, who cowrote the document, to talk about it.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
How did we get here? What’s the impetus for this specific idea – an authority to handle building out offshore wind?
As you have covered very closely, [the Trump administration is] stymying huge manufacturing opportunities for union workers, and obviously putting [decarbonization] way off course. Even though it’s an odd time to talk about a federally-focused offshore wind agenda, I think because the administration is scaring off investment in this sector, increasingly our only option in a more amenable administration may be to just do it ourselves.
From my perspective, we can’t just abdicate this critical decarb sector. It’s so close to coastal population centers, so close to where people live in high-density urban areas that need electricity. So we need to be preparing for how we make up for this massive amount of lost time. We’re also trying to break through some of the longer term coordination problems the offshore wind sector has run into.
Your report outlines past examples of authorities like the Tennessee Valley Authority – help me understand what this would look like for offshore wind.
There are definitely examples of what we’re discussing here, and we evoke the moonshot as one of these examples where the government got behind a major technological jump and used industrial policy to make that happen — doing some of the planning, investing in companies directly via equity stakes, developing its own public enterprises or departments within the government to drive towards a common goal.
Then, of course, there was the rural electrification administration and the TVA development. The federal government has used more of its planning muscle to drive toward a critical goal, and from our perspective, a critical goal is decarbonizing the electricity sector. Yet at the same time, we’re seeing massive electricity cost spikes, so we’re trying to ponder how an authority like this could actually do that.
There are three areas where we’d imagine this authority to be involved. The first is actual development of offshore wind projects – a stable baseline for offshore wind by always being the bidder of last resort, actively bidding on projects along the coast. This also creates a baseline for the supply chain generally.
We also see an opportunity here in offshore transmission grids, because I’m sure you’re well aware how mired those grids have become. There are opportunities for increased planning around the grid to ensure a higher level of coordination. And by having a federal authority, it will lower the cost to other offshore wind developers.
The third piece is the supply chain manufacturing — more so a coordination role, sure, but also an opportunity for the federal government to leverage its large-scale procurement power. It would help provide security for a lot of the components in this moment of uncertainty.
On one hand, the benefit of the public option is a birch rod for the private sector. If the public entity is providing things at lower cost and with potentially higher commitments to higher wages, with more people wanting to work for the public entity, it can bring the entirety of the industry up because they’d have to compete with the agency.
On the other hand, I think there’s pieces of this that actually draw down costs, like the transmission and supply chain pieces.
What do you say to the percentage of the public that is opposed to offshore wind development?
I think there has been a very effective disinformation campaign. We also see a benefit in planning because we can limit overbuild and be strategic about where it’s deployed to limit permitting snags and other turmoil.
Okay, but the big question hovering over this is how it gets done. You’re going to need to convince the public to create this authority. And this is such an ambitious idea. How do you reckon with that?
Because so much has been lost during this administration, in terms of public planning and the DOGE cuts, there will be this need on a grand scale to supercharge and re-double efforts in a wide range of areas. My feeling is that we have to build toward a political appetite.
We have to think about big, ambitious solutions like this. Is this actually an opportunity to lower costs, not just decarb? Are there ways to think about that to build an enduring political coalition?
We’re seeing the Trump administration use some of these policy levers much more stridently than former Democratic presidents have used — like with equity stakes. We could do that kind of thing, too.
The truth is we have three years to build the political opportunities and coalition to do this.