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Spotlight

Is the California Battery Fire an East Palestine Moment?

Moss Landing is turning into a growing problem for the energy storage industry.

Moss Landing in the crosshairs.
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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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Hotspots

Judge, Siding With Trump, Saves Solar From NEPA

And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.

  • We previously reported that this lawsuit filed by frustrated Kansans targeted implementation of the IRA when it first was filed in February. That was true then, but afterwards an amended complaint was filed that focused entirely on the solar farm at the heart of the case: NextEra’s Jeffrey Solar. The case focuses now on whether Jeffrey benefiting from IRA credits means it should’ve gotten reviewed under the National Environmental Policy Act.
  • Perhaps surprisingly to some, the Trump Justice Department argued against these NEPA reviews – a posture that jibes with the administration’s approach to streamlining the overall environmental analysis process but works in favor of companies using IRA credits.
  • In a ruling that came down on Tuesday, District Judge Holly Teeter ruled the landowners lacked standing to sue because “there is a mismatch between their environmental concerns tied to construction of the Jeffrey Solar Project and the tax credits and regulations,” and they did not “plausibly allege the substantial federal control and responsibility necessary to trigger NEPA review.”
  • “Plaintiffs’ claims, arguments, and requested relief have been difficult to analyze,” Teeter wrote in her opinion. “They are trying to use the procedural requirements of NEPA as a roadblock because they do not like what Congress has chosen to incentivize and what regulations Jackson County is considering. But those challenges must be made to the legislative branch, not to the judiciary.”

2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.

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Spotlight

Renewables Swept Up in Data Center Backlash

Just look at Virginia.

A data center.
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Solar and wind projects are getting swept up in the blowback to data center construction, presenting a risk to renewable energy companies who are hoping to ride the rise of AI in an otherwise difficult moment for the industry.

The American data center boom is going to demand an enormous amount of electricity and renewables developers believe much of it will come from solar and wind. But while these types of energy generation may be more easily constructed than, say, a fossil power plant, it doesn’t necessarily mean a connection to a data center will make a renewable project more popular. Not to mention data centers in rural areas face complaints that overlap with prominent arguments against solar and wind – like noise and impacts to water and farmland – which is leading to unfavorable outcomes for renewable energy developers more broadly when a community turns against a data center.

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Q&A

How the Wind Industry Can Fight Back

A conversation with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications

The Q&A subject.
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Today’s conversation is with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications, a D.C.-based communications firm that focuses on defending zero- and low-carbon energy and federal investments in climate action. Moyer, a veteran communications adviser who previously worked on Capitol Hill, has some hot takes as of late about how he believes industry and political leaders have in his view failed to properly rebut attacks on solar and wind energy, in addition to the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday he sent an email blast out to his listserv – which I am on – that boldly declared: “The Wind Industry’s Strategy is Failing.”

Of course after getting that email, it shouldn’t surprise readers of The Fight to hear I had to understand what he meant by that, and share it with all of you. So here goes. The following conversation has been abridged and lightly edited for clarity.

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