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Moss Landing is turning into a growing problem for the energy storage industry.
The Moss Landing battery fire now may be the storage industry’s East Palestine moment – at least in California.
In the weeks since Vistra’s battery plant south of San Francisco caught fire on January 16, at least two lawsuits have been filed against Vistra, PG&E, and battery manufacturer LG Chem by people and business owners claiming damages from the blaze. I have learned at least one more will be filed by individuals who’ve conducted headline-grabbing soil samples that found toxic metals.
Meanwhile, towns and counties up and down the California coastline have banned new battery storage projects and requested more control from the state over permitting and operating them.
At the granular level, circumstances look even more tense. Santa Barbara County this week voted to proactively plan for the potential enactment of legislation before the California state assembly that would let localities be the decider on battery storage, instead of state authorities. The bill is scheduled for its first hearing in the assembly’s utility committee in early April. County officials voted to act essentially like it will become the law of the land, despite testimony from local community services staff noting how unique the Moss Landing event was.
What was especially stark to me: Robert Shaw – CEO of local utility Central Coast Community Energy – spoke before the supervisors and made it clear lots of additional storage would be required for the company to meet its 2030 climate commitments. He explained that storage has to be close to where the energy load is in order to avoid costly transmission lines, telling the board that “in order to operate, they’ve got to add reliability to the grid – but they’ve also got to be affordable.”
Now, today, we’re expecting new regulations arising from California’s battery fire fears: the Public Utilities Commission will vote to adopt proposed recommendations for battery storage siting requirements. This will include requirements for emergency response and action plans after battery fires and new standards for safe operation. A vote to adopt these recommendations is scheduled later this afternoon and advocates in California tell me they anticipate no hiccups.
So why such a profound local revolt? How did California rapidly deploy battery storage only to veer into possibly emboldening local control, which certainly may make residents feel better but would also stall the pace of the energy transition?
I’ve spent the last week looking into it and the simplest explanation is this: Moss Landing still feels like a disaster zone. Residents miles away from where the blaze occurred are suffering mysterious illnesses, like random bloody noses and headaches, and medical issues they suspect is related to the fire, such as a random metallic taste. I’ve seen the pictures of skin that looks burned and heard the voices of people who say they no longer have most of their voice after inhaling airborne substances after the event. Locals are routinely posting online about how they’re extremely disappointed with the government’s response, especially state and federal officials, and at the end of the day, no matter the cause, word of such profound and lasting suffering can spread across the internet like, well, a wildfire.
The industry also clearly believes opposition is growing because of misunderstandings about how Moss Landing was a singular incident – most battery storage sites are outdoors and use battery chemistries that offer less risk of a “thermal runaway” event, which is the term of art used to describe the uncontrolled fire spread that can occur at a battery storage site.
Renewables trade group American Clean Power gathered media last week for a virtual briefing to discuss battery safety, during which the group’s vice president of energy storage Noah Roberts sought to reassure the public and said the organization is “working to ensure that an event like this doesn’t happen in the future and do not anticipate an event like this will happen in the future.”
“This battery storage project was located within a retrofitted power plant from the 1950s and very much represents a global anomaly,” Roberts said, adding that “this incident and its impact is not something we have previously seen.”
None of this is stopping Moss Landing from becoming a galvanizing event. I’ve learned that activists on the ground and their attorneys are receiving a flood of inquiries from individuals fighting battery projects elsewhere in the United States.
“You’re going to feel absolutely like guinea pigs — and, unfortunately, you are because protocols weren’t in place,” environmental activist Erin Brockovich told affected residents at a public virtual town hall I attended late Tuesday night. Brockovich encouraged anyone who believes they were impacted by the battery fire to work publicly and behind the scenes to get the local control legislation in the state assembly passed. “Your input, hundreds and hundreds of you, on this legislation can help change the course for many communities in California in the future, on where [BESS] is built, how far away. Are they not going to be built?”
Knut Johnson, an attorney who is representing victims in one of the lawsuits, told me he believes this story should ultimately go national with seismic ramifications for the storage industry. He also told me he’s “curious to see how the Trump administration responds to this.” Johnson put the webinar on with Brockovich, who, he told me, is acting as a paralegal assisting with the case.
“This was so sudden and unexpected and following several years of magical thinking where they weren’t preparing for this possibility,” he said of the developers and state officials.
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Plus, what a Texas energy veteran thinks is behind the surprising turn against solar and wind.
I couldn’t have a single conversation with a developer this week without talking about Texas.
In case you’re unaware, the Texas Senate two days ago passed legislation — SB 819 — that would require all solar and wind projects over 10 megawatts to receive a certification from the state Public Utilities Commission — a process fossil fuel generation doesn’t have to go through. The bill, which one renewables group CEO testified would “kill” the industry in Texas, was approved by the legislature’s GOP majority despite a large number of landowners and ranchers testifying against the bill, an ongoing solar and wind boom in the state, and a need to quickly provide energy to Texas’ growing number of data centers and battery manufacturing facilities.
But that’s not all: On the same day, the Texas Senate Business and Commerce Committee approved a bill — SB 715 — that would target solar and wind by requiring generation facilities to be able to produce power whenever called upon by grid operators or otherwise pay a fine. Critics of the bill, which as written does not differentiate between new and existing facilities, say it could constrain the growth of Texas’ energy grid, not to mention impose penalties on solar and wind facilities that lack sufficient energy storage on site.
Renewable energy trades are in freak-out mode, mobilizing to try and scuttlebutt bills that could stifle what otherwise would be a perfect state for the sector. As we’ve previously explained, a big reason why Texas is so good for development is because, despite its ruby red nature, there is scant regulation letting towns or counties get in the way of energy development generally.
Seeking to best understand why anti-renewables bills are sailing through the Lone Star State, I phoned Doug Lewin, a Texas energy sector veteran, on the morning of the votes in the Texas Senate. Lewin said he believes that unlike other circumstances we’ve written about, like Oklahoma and Arizona, there really isn’t a groundswell of Texans against renewable energy development. This aligns with our data in Heatmap Pro, which shows 76% of counties being more welcoming than average to a utility-scale wind or solar farm. This is seen even in the author of the 24/7 power bill – state Senator Kevin Sparks – who represents the city of Midland, which is in a county that Heatmap Pro modeling indicates has a low risk of opposition. The Midland area is home to several wind and solar projects; German renewables giant RWE last month announced it would expand into the county to power oil and gas extraction with renewables.
But Lewin told me there’s another factor: He believes the legislation is largely motivated by legislators’ conservative voters suffering from a “misinformation” and “algorithm” problem. It’s their information diets, he believes, which are producing fears about the environmental impacts of developing renewable energy.
“He’s actively working against the interests of his district,” Lewin said of Sparks. “It’s algorithms. I don’t know what folks think is going on. People are just getting a lot of bad information.”
One prominent example came from a hailstorm during Hurricane Uri last year. Ice rocks described like golfballs rained down upon south-east Texas, striking, among other things, a utility-scale solar farm called Fighting Jays overseen by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The incident went viral on Facebook and was seized upon by large conservative advocacy organizations including the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
What’s next? Honestly, the only thing standing between these bills and becoming law is a sliver of hope in the renewables world that the millions of dollars flowing into Texas House members’ districts via project investments and tax benefits outweigh the conservative cultural animus against their product. But if the past is prologue, things aren’t looking great.
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Westchester County, N.Y. – Residents in Yonkers are pressuring city officials to renew a moratorium on battery storage before it expires in July.
2. Atlantic County, New Jersey – Sorry Atlantic Shores, but you’re not getting your EPA permit back.
3. St Clair County, Michigan – We may soon have what appears to be the first-ever county health regulations targeting renewable energy.
4. Freeborn County, Minnesota – Officials in this county have rejected a Midwater Energy Storage battery storage project citing concerns about fires.
5. Little River County, Arkansas – A petition circulating in this county would put the tax abatement for a NextEra solar project up for a vote county-wide.
6. Van Zandt County, Texas – Officials in this county have reportedly succeeded in getting a court to impose a restraining order against Taaleri Energy to halt the Amador battery storage project.
7. Gillespie County, Texas – Peregrine Energy’s battery storage proposal in the rural town of Harper is also facing a mounting local outcry.
8. Churchill County, Nevada – Battery storage might be good for Nevada mining, but we have what appears to be our first sign of revolt against the technology in the state.
A conversation with Mike Barnwell of the Michigan Regional Council of Carpenters and Millwrights
Today’s conversation is with Mike Barnwell at the Michigan Regional Council of Carpenters and Millwrights, a union organization more than 14,000 members strong. I reached out to Barnwell because I’d been trying to better understand the role labor unions could play in influencing renewables policy decisions, from the labor permitting office to the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act. So I called him up on my way home from the American Clean Power Association’s permitting conference in Seattle, where I gave a talk, and we chatted about how much I love Coney Island chili in Detroit. Oh, and renewable energy, of course.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
I guess to start, we covered Michigan’s new permitting and siting law. What role did your union play in that process?
Locally, with the siting laws, we were a big part of that from the local level all the way to the state. From speaking at the Capitol down to city council and building authority meetings about projects happening in areas and cleaning out some of the red tape to make these possible.
It’s created jobs for our members current and future.
So you see labor as being helpful in getting permitting done faster?
Being labor maybe I’m biased but I think it is. I say labor collectively, we’ve got a pretty good coalition here in Michigan.
Do you think unions like yours will be similarly influential in the future of the Inflation Reduction Act back in Washington, D.C.?
Let me put it this way: the requirements of registered apprenticeships being on site come back to creating jobs for our members. Otherwise it’s just hiring anybody off the street – unskilled and unsafe workplaces. We train our folks through our apprenticeships and that legislation is ensuring safety on the jobs for one, let alone letting them build careers and pensions.
We’re a carpenter-centric union but this all falls under the work of what we do. We’ve been implementing our four-year apprenticeship program — every kind of renewable energy training you can think of, we’ve implemented it into our programs. It’s hands on. We have mockups at our training centers where [projects] get built and torn down and built and torn down. When you talk about a utility-scale solar project, it’s an average of 160-170 individuals working on that project. Without proper skills training they can’t work in coordination with each other.
How are you feeling about the future of the tax credits?
Uneasy.
The current leadership, they obviously have different views than the past leadership did. Lookit – when you talk about the IRA that has done nothing but create jobs for the blue collar working man in not just our state but around the nation. Here in Michigan, it almost went from zero to sixty in 10 seconds. It was miraculous what they did for us. We went from scratching and clawing in trying to procure these projects to now the IRA requiring skill training and prevailing wage and benefits and health care, which what as a union we’re all about.
Just in the last year, we’ve brought on over 300 new members just for solar alone. That’s all because of the federal tax credit and the language in the IRA.
Last question – what role do you see labor playing in the process of getting individual projects permitted and built?
Our role in that, I’ve been to plenty of these community meetings myself but it’s the actual working guy, the guy who is using his tools every week, who goes and speaks up to their county or town leadership about the benefits of these projects.
That big BlueOval battery plant in Marshall, Michigan – I don’t know if that would’ve been permitted without the work of our members being at those meetings, letting their voices be heard. There was obviously an opposition voice as well, but ours were a bit louder in the room. People want to hear the voices that say yes we want it and here’s why. This is how I support my family from the work on these projects. Otherwise it would’ve never gotten off the ground.