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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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A conversation with Heather O’Neill of Advanced Energy United.
This week’s conversation is with Heather O’Neill, CEO of renewables advocacy group Advanced Energy United. I wanted to chat with O’Neill in light of the recent effective repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credits and the action at the Interior Department clamping down on development. I’m quite glad she was game to talk hot topics, including the future of wind energy and whether we’ll see blue states step into the vacuum left by the federal government.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
During Trump 1.0 we saw blue states really step into the climate role in light of the federal government. Do you see anything similar taking place now?
I think this moment we’re in – it is a different moment.
How are we handling load growth? How are we making sure consumers are not paying for expensive stranded assets? Thinking about energy affordability? All of those challenges absolutely present a different moment and will result in a different response from state leaders.
But that’s where some of the changes our industry has gone through mean we’re able to meet that moment and provide solutions to those challenges. I think we need aggressive action from state leaders and I think we’ll see that from them, because of the challenges in front of them.
What does that look like?
Every state is different. Take Virginia for example. Five years after we passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act – a big, bold promise of action – we’re not on track. So what are the things we need to do to keep the foot on the accelerator there? This last legislative session we passed the virtual power plant legislation that’ll help tremendously in terms of grid flexibility. We made a big push around siting and permitting reform, and we didn’t quite get it over the finish line but that’s the kind of thing where we made a good foundation.
Or Texas. There’s so much advanced energy powering Texas right now. You had catastrophic grid failure in Hurricane Uri and look at what they’ve been able to build out in response to that: wind, solar, and in the last few years, battery storage, and they just passed the energy waste reduction [bill].
We need to build things and make it easier to build – siting and permitting reform – but it’s also states depending on their environment looking at and engaging with their regional transmission organization.
You saw that last week, a robust set of governors across the PJM region called on them to improve their interconnection queue. It’s about pushing and finding reforms at the market level, to get these assets online and get on the grid deployed.
I think the point about forward momentum, I definitely see what you’re saying there about the need for action. Do you see state primacy laws or pre-emption laws? Like what Michigan, New York, and California have done…
I’m not a siting expert, but the reform packages that work the best include engagement from communities in meaningful ways. But they also make sure you’re not having a vocal minority drowning out the benefits and dragging out the process forever. There are timelines and certainty attached to it while still having meaningful local engagement.
Our industry absolutely has to continue to lean into more local engagement and community engagement around the benefits of a project and what they can deliver for a community. I also think there’s a fair amount of making sure the state is creating that pathway, providing that certainty, so we can actually move forward to build out these projects.
From the federal government’s perspective, they’re cracking down on wind and solar projects while changing the tax credits. Do you see states presenting their own incentives for renewables in lieu of federal incentives? I’ve wondered if that’ll happen given inflation and affordability concerns.
No, I think we have to be really creative as an industry, and state leaders have to be creative too. If I’m a governor, affordability concerns were already front and center for me, and now given what just happened, they’re grappling with incredibly tight state budgets that are about to get tighter, including health care. They’re going to see state budgets hit really hard. And there’s energy impacts – we’re cutting off supply, so we’re going to see prices go up.
This is where governors and state leaders can act but I think in this context of tight state budgets I don’t think we can expect to see states replacing incentive packages.
It’ll be: how do we take advantage of all the flexible tools that we have to help shape and reduce demand in meaningful ways that’ll save consumers money, as well as push on building out projects and getting existing juice out of the transmission system we have today.
Is there a future for wind in the United States?
It is an incredibly challenging environment – no question – for all of our technologies, wind included. I don’t want to sugar-coat that at all.
But I look at the whole picture, and I include wind in this: the technologies have improved dramatically in the past couple of decades and the costs have come down. When you look around at what resources are around to deploy, it’s advanced energy. We’re seeing it continue to grow. There’ll be headwinds, and it’ll be more expensive for all of us. But I look at what our industry and our technologies are able to offer and deliver, and I am confident we’ll continue to see growth.
The Grain Belt Express was just the beginning.
The anti-renewables movement is now coming for transmission lines as the Trump administration signals a willingness to cut off support for wires that connect to renewable energy sources.
Last week, Trump’s Energy Department with a brief letter rescinded a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee to Invenergy for the Grain Belt Express line that would, if completed, connect wind projects in Kansas to areas of Illinois and Indiana. This decision followed a groundswell of public opposition over concerns about land use and agricultural impacts – factors that ring familiar to readers of The Fight – which culminated in Republican Senator Josh Hawley reportedly asking Donald Trump in a meeting to order the loan’s cancellation. It’s unclear whether questions around the legality of this loan cancellation will be resolved in the courts, meaning Invenergy may just try to trudge ahead and not pick a fight with the Trump administration.
But the Grain Belt Express is not an anomaly. Across the country, transmission lines tied to both renewable sources and more conventional fuels – both fossil and nuclear – are facing a growing chorus of angst and anguish from the same crowds that are fighting renewable energy. In some ways, it’s a tale as old as widespread transmission itself. But I am also talking about farmers, ranchers, and rural towns who all now mention transmission lines in the same exasperated breaths they use to bemoan solar, wind, and battery storage. Many of the same communities fighting zero-carbon energy sources see those conflicts as part of a broader stand against a new age of tech industrial build-out – meaning that after a solar or wind farm is defeated, that activism energy is likely to go elsewhere, including expanding the grid.
I’ve been trying to figure out if there are other situations like Grain Belt, where a project facing local headwinds could potentially be considered no longer investable from a renewables-skeptic federal perspective. And that’s why since Invenergy lost its cash for that project, I have been digging into the Cimarron Link transmission line, another Invenergy facility proposed to carry wind energy from eastern Oklahoma to the western part of the state, according to a map on the developer’s website.
Do you remember the campaign to ban wind energy in Oklahoma that I profiled at the start of this year? Well, one of the most prominent scalps that this activism movement has claimed was bagged in late 2024, when they successfully pressured Governor Kevin Stitt into opposing a priority transmission corridor proposed by the Biden administration. Then another one of the activists’ biggest accomplishments came through an anti-wind law enacted this year that would, among other things, require transmission projects to go through a new certification program before the state’s Corporation Commission. Many of the figures fighting Cimarron and another transmission line project – NextEra’s Heartland Spirit Connector – are also involved in fighting wind and solar across the state, and see the struggles as part and parcel with each other.
Invenergy appears to want to soldier on through this increasingly difficult process, or at least that’s according to a letter some landowners received that was posted to Facebook. But these hurdles will seriously impact the plausibility that Cimarron Link can be completed any time soon.
Now, on top of these hurdles, critics want Cimarron Link to get the Grain Belt treatment. Cimarron Link was told last fall it was awarded north of $300 million from the Energy Department as a part of DOE’s Transmission Facilitation Program.
Enter Darren Blanchard, a farmer who says his property is in the path of Cimarron Link and has been one of the main public faces of opposition against the project. Blanchard has recently been pleading with the DOE to nix the disposition of that money if it hasn’t been given already. Blanchard wrote the agency a lengthy request that Cimarron get similar treatment to Grain Belt which was made public in the appendix of the agency’s decision documents related to the loan cancellation (see page 23 of this document).
To Blanchard’s surprise, he got a reply from the Transmission Facilitation Program office “responding on behalf of” Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The note, to him, read like they wanted him to know they saw his comment: “We appreciate you taking the time to share your views on the project,” it read.
Now, this might’ve been innocuous. I haven’t heard back from the Energy Department about Cimarron Link and I am personally skeptical of the chances a grant is canceled easily. There is no high-level politician calling for the cancellation of this money right now, like there was in Sen. Josh Hawley and the Grain Belt Express.
But I do believe that if there is a will, there is a way with the Trump administration. And as anti-renewables sentiments abound further, there’ll be more ways to create woe for transmission projects like Cimarron that connect to renewable resources. Should voices like Blanchard aim their sights at replicating what happened with Grain Belt, well… bets may be off.
Over the next few weeks, I will be chronicling more fights over individual transmission projects connected to zero-carbon sources. Unique but with implications for a host of proposed wires across the country, they’re trend-setters, so to speak. Next week I’ll be tackling some power lines out West, so stay tuned.
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The fight over Vineyard Wind is back with a vengeance. But can an aggrieved vacation town team up with conservative legal activists to take down an operating offshore wind project?
2. Henry County, Virginia – A fresh fiasco around a solar farm is renewing animus against solar projects in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
3. Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana – Solar developer Aypa is now suing this parish on the grounds it allegedly used zoning rules in an unfair and biased manner against one of its projects.
4. Outagamie County, Wisconsin – If at first you don’t kill the solar farm, try and go after the substation.
5. La Paz County, Arizona – Republicans in Congress are helping at least one area open up for more solar development.
6. Idaho – The federal government will officially re-do its review of the LS Energy Lava Ridge wind farm.
7. Monterey County, California – The EPA is finally getting more involved in the Moss Landing battery plant cleanup, after the agency declared this week it approved a new comprehensive remediation plan under CERCLA, a law that also governs the Superfund program.