How California Is Fighting the Battery Backlash

This week’s conversation is a follow up with Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University. As you may recall we spoke with Mulvaney in the immediate aftermath of the Moss Landing battery fire disaster, which occurred near his university’s campus. Mulvaney told us the blaze created a true-blue PR crisis for the energy storage industry in California and predicted it would cause a wave of local moratoria on development. Eight months after our conversation, it’s clear as day how right he was. So I wanted to check back in with him to see how the state’s development landscape looks now and what the future may hold with the Moss Landing dust settled.

Help my readers get a state of play – where are we now in terms of the post-Moss Landing resistance landscape?

A couple things are going on. Monterey Bay is surrounded by Monterey County and Santa Cruz County and both are considering ordinances around battery storage. That’s different than a ban – important. You can have an ordinance that helps facilitate storage. Some people here are very focused on climate change issues and the grid, because here in Santa Cruz County we’re at a terminal point where there really is no renewable energy, so we have to have battery storage. And like, in Santa Cruz County the ordinance would be for unincorporated areas – I’m not sure how materially that would impact things. There’s one storage project in Watsonville near Moss Landing, and the ordinance wouldn’t even impact that. Even in Monterey County, the idea is to issue a moratorium and again, that’s in unincorporated areas, too.

It’s important to say how important battery storage is going to be for the coastal areas. That’s where you see the opposition, but all of our renewables are trapped in southern California and we have a bottleneck that moves power up and down the state. If California doesn’t get offshore wind or wind from Wyoming into the northern part of the state, we’re relying on batteries to get that part of the grid decarbonized.

In the areas of California where batteries are being opposed, who is supporting them and fighting against the protests? I mean, aside from the developers and an occasional climate activist.

The state has been strongly supporting the industry. Lawmakers in the state have been really behind energy storage and keeping things headed in that direction of more deployment. Other than that, I think you’re right to point out there’s not local advocates saying, “We need more battery storage.” It tends to come from Sacramento. I’m not sure you’d see local folks in energy siting usually, but I think it’s also because we are still actually deploying battery storage in some areas of the state. If we were having even more trouble, maybe we’d have more advocacy for development in response.

Has the Moss Landing incident impacted renewable energy development in California? I’ve seen some references to fears about that incident crop up in fights over solar in Imperial County, for example, which I know has been coveted for development.

Everywhere there’s batteries, people are pointing at Moss Landing and asking how people will deal with fires. I don’t know how powerful the arguments are in California, but I see it in almost every single renewable project that has a battery.

Okay, then what do you think the next phase of this is? Are we just going to be trapped in a battery fire fear cycle, or do you think this backlash will evolve?

We’re starting to see it play out here with the state opt-in process where developers can seek state approval to build without local approval. As this situation after Moss Landing has played out, more battery developers have wound up in the opt-in process. So what we’ll see is more battery developers try to get permission from the state as opposed to local officials.

There are some trade-offs with that. But there are benefits in having more resources to help make the decisions. The state will have more expertise in emergency response, for example, whereas every local jurisdiction has to educate themselves. But no matter what I think they’ll be pursuing the opt-in process – there’s nothing local governments can really do to stop them with that.

Part of what we’re seeing though is, you have to have a community benefit agreement in place for the project to advance under the California Environmental Quality Act. The state has been pretty strict about that, and that’s the one thing local folks could still do – influence whether a developer can get a community benefits agreement with representatives on the ground. That’s the one strategy local folks who want to push back on a battery could use, block those agreements. Other than that, I think some counties here in California may not have much resistance. They need the revenue and see these as economic opportunities.

I can’t help but hear optimism in your tone of voice here. It seems like in spite of the disaster, development is still moving forward. Do you think California is doing a better or worse job than other states at deploying battery storage and handling the trade offs?

Oh, better. I think the opt-in process looks like a nice balance between taking local authority away over things and the better decision-making that can be brought in. The state creating that program is one way to help encourage renewables and avoid a backlash, honestly, while staying on track with its decarbonization goals.