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Sparks

It Took More Than 4 Days to Put Out This Battery Fire

The California energy storage facility is just a short hop from the Mexican border.

Cal Fire trucks.
Heatmap Illustration/Screenshot/KUSI-TV

A fire at a battery storage site in San Diego County appears to have been extinguished after burning on and off for multiple days and nights.

“There is no visible smoke or active fire at the scene,” Cal Fire, the state fire protection agency, said in an update Monday morning.

The fire started sometime Wednesday at the Gateway Energy Storage facility, a 250 megawatt battery electric storage system in Otay Mesa, which is immediately adjacent both to the eastern border of San Diego and to the northern border of Mexico and near the Richard J. Donovan state prison facility.

Firefighters first succeeded in putting out the blaze on Thursday, “but a flare-up later that night brought firefighters back to the scene,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Firefighters continued working on the flames all weekend. As late as Sunday, there were 40 firefighters at the scene, according to Union-Tribune reporters.

Gateway’s owner and operator is LS Power, which has not responded to a request for comment as of publication time. LS Power operates several battery electric storage facilities in both California and New York. Gateway went into operation in 2020, as did many battery storage projects in California. Its purpose is to charge when energy is cheap or when there’s plentiful solar power so that it can deliver that excess energy back to the grid at times of high demand.

Fires have been a recurring problem for the battery electric storage industry, which may be one reason why, according to Heatmap polling, it is the form of carbon-free power least popular with the general public. Firefighters need specific training to deal with battery fires, and “thermal runaway” — i.e. one cell overheating and igniting leading to another cell doing so and so on — can mean that fires last for several days at very high temperatures.

On Saturday, Cal Fire reported that “lithium batteries continue to experience thermal runaway,” and that the fire had “burned through part of the roof.” As of now, fire personnel are “on standby in case additional batteries undergo thermal runaway.”

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Sparks

This Natural Gas Plant Is a Poster Child for America’s Grid Weirdness

Elgin Energy Center is back from the dead.

A gas plant.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

At least one natural gas plant in America’s biggest energy market that was scheduled to shut down is staying open. Elgin Energy Center, an approximately 500 megawatt plant in Illinois approximately 40 miles northwest of downtown Chicago was scheduled to shut down next June, according to filings with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and officials from PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest regional transmission organization, which governs the relevant portion of the U.S. grid. Elgin’s parent company “no longer intends to deactivate and retire all four units ... at the Elgin Energy Center,” according to a letter dated September 4 and posted to PJM’s website Wednesday.

The Illinois plant is something of a poster child for PJM’s past few years. In 2022, it was one of many natural gas plants to shut down during Winter Storm Elliott as the natural gas distribution seized up. Its then-parent company, Lincoln Power — owned by Cogentrix, the Carlyle Group’s vehicle for its power business — filed for bankruptcy the following year, after PJM assessed almost $40 million in penalties for failing to operate during the storm. In June, a bankruptcy court approved the acquisition of the Elgin plant, along with one other, by Middle River Power, a generation business backed by Avenue Capital, a $12 billion investment firm, in a deal that was closed in December.

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“You believe in things that the American people don’t believe in,” he said, addressing Harris. “You believe in things like, we’re not gonna frack. We’re not gonna take fossil fuel. We’re not gonna do — things that are going to make this country strong, whether you like it or not.”

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What Would Trump Do About Climate Change? Something About the Mayor of Moscow’s Wife.

Hunter Biden also made an appearance in Trump’s answer to the debate’s one climate question.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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Harris responded to the question by laying out the successes of Biden’s energy policy and in particular, the Inflation Reduction Act (though she didn’tmention it by name). “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy,” Harris noted.

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