Today’s conversation is with Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University. Mulvaney is a social scientist who spent much of his time before January 2025 advocating for more considerate and humane renewable energy development. Then Moss Landing happened. Mulvaney – who was there at Moss Landing the first day – is now obsessed with the myriad safety concerns laden in large-scale utility battery storage and what plans were in place to deal with the fire. His reasoning? A failure to grapple with safety concerns could undermine public trust in battery storage and make a transition away from fossil fuels more difficult.
The following is an abridged version of our conversation, which was the interview that first prompted me to investigate the mystery of the health concerns surrounding the fire.
Why are you so concerned about what safety plan was in place before the Moss Landing battery fire?
Three o’clock was when the battery started smoking. The giant fire doesn’t happen until six o’clock and there were reporters on scene saying, the smoke’s gone. Then all of the sudden: boom. Just blows up, big time.
They didn’t evacuate the neighborhood until six. The neighborhood should’ve been evacuated at three when the smoke started.
Wait – they didn’t evacuate the neighborhood until three hours after the fire?
It depends what you mean by fire. There weren’t flames the first few hours. From the planning side, they should’ve at least been notified they would be evacuated if the fire got worse.
That’s part of the problem. You’ve got all these people looking around at this gigantic fire and that’s scary. And on the monitoring part, there should be a plan for how to monitor the fire. How come no one flew a drone into the cloud of smoke to look for whatever’s in there to just get a sense? And they were checking for hydrofluoric acid all around but they were all at ground level. It just feels like they weren’t prepared.
Why does it concern you that they were only checking for that chemical at ground level?
We had an inversion that night and when we get a little inversion off the bay, the air is really clean and clear. I got pretty close to the fire that night. I got as close as the police would let me go. And I was breathing clean air at ground level. I want to say I was a mile away.
So what do you think was most missing from a regulatory standpoint here? What should’ve been done that wasn’t done at a state level?
If you think about it, the pipeline explosion killed all those people in San Bruno before the California Public Utilities Commission said maybe we should regulate pipelines a little better, and then burned down cities with hooks that were 100 years old from power lines and [said] maybe we should do something better on power lines. To me it feels like the CPUC is the one who has been dragging their feet on all of this.
Because they’re behind on planning?
The CPUC is in charge of safety. It’s part of CPUC’s job to make sure that pipelines don’t explode and transmission lines don’t catch fire.
I agree that we need to be safer, but there’s some pretty serious urgency to build a lot more of these batteries, fast, no?
So, the analogy that I was trying to go with was that when CPUC doesn’t do its job, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has threatened to come in. When pipeline explosions happen and if CPUC doesn’t do its job–
So do you want a Trump administration FERC to step in?
Absolutely not, that is not what I am saying. I’m not advocating for that. No way.
It’s the question of where is everybody? The CPUC should’ve stepped in and implemented regulations immediately. Maybe we’d see something different here. Maybe someone goes in and inspects that battery facility and sees we need corrugated metal from Home Depot.
This is going to get worse. I’m sure if there’s anybody with battery storage in a building like Moss Landing they are now being asked, I’m sure their insurers are asking, where’s your thermal runaway certification for that facility?
