www.montereycountynow.com MARCH 27-APRIL 2, 2025 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 17 About three weeks later and 700 miles away, the Monterey County Planning Commission, on May 8, considered approving a project unlike anything ever seen in the county, or anywhere: The project would amend the Moss Landing Power Plant Master Plan to include the use of renewable energy storage, and Vistra, a Texasbased energy company that acquired the property in 2018 when it merged with Dynegy, would reuse an old turbine building to establish a 300-megawatt Battery Energy Storage System, aka BESS. Though it wasn’t highlighted at the time, it would be the biggest BESS in the world, all under one roof. By the time the project came before the commissioners around 11:30am, they had just spent over 90 minutes discussing a second cannabis dispensary in unincorporated Carmel. The commissioners had already been acquainted with Vistra’s project when it was first presented to them in March, but they had decided to delay voting on it until concerns from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife could be addressed. Rehashing the project took just a few minutes—energy comes off the grid and is stored in racks of batteries inside the 96,411-square-foot building, and when needed, is sent back out to the grid to supply energy. There was no comment from the public outside of previous letters from CDFW and Caltrans, nor was there discussion among commissioners. If anyone in the room was aware of the explosion in Surprise, Arizona, they didn’t mention it. This despite that, the environmental documents the commissioners were being asked to approve included a section reading, in part: “With any battery storage system, there is a risk of fire resulting from overheating or electrically faulty conditions in the battery energy storage…A range of active fire protection features would be installed in the battery storage building in the unlikely event that the passive source features were to fail.” Seemingly surprised at the lack of discussion, Chair Paul Getzelman turned to Commissioner Martha Diehl, who had been vocal in the March meeting in support of the project’s renewable energy goals. “Commissioner Diehl, do you have thoughts?” Getzelman said. “You always have thoughts…no?” “Look at me not having any thoughts,” Diehl said. “Can we get that on the record?” Getzelman said, as he turned to county staff. “I guess we just did.” More than five years later, around 3pm on Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025, Joel Mendoza, chief of the North County Fire Protection District, was at his department’s station in Castroville when a call came in about a structure fire along Highway 1 in Moss Landing. Mendoza and his colleagues immediately recognized the address—Vistra’s Moss Landing Power Plant. On the way there, reports over dispatch made clear it was at Moss 300, a battery energy storage facility the firefighters were intimately familiar with. They had toured it, inspected it, and in 2021, responded to an incident at the building when some batteries started to smoke. As Mendoza and other firefighters arrived on the scene about 10 minutes later, he could see smoke rising from the roof as they approached. “We had a good sense something was escalating,” he says. “We knew there was probably a fire inside the building.” After ensuring everyone onsite was safely accounted for, Mendoza and his team gathered as much information as they could from the plant manager and others. “Once we confirmed through their CCTV that [battery] racks were actively burning and spreading from rack to rack, we knew this was going to be a large-scale incident,” he says. So they notified county officials—the Department of Emergency Management, the Sheriff’s Office and Environmental Health—around 3:30pm, and by 5pm, the County advised nearby residents to close their windows, doors and shut off their air systems until further notice. At around the same time, as North County firefighters were laying hoses to douse a wall of the building, that wall and the roof started to collapse. That was when the decision was made to relocate the incident’s command post from an adjacent building to off the property, at the Power Plant Cafe’s parking lot across Highway 1. As responders gathered there, Mendoza says one of his engines reported seeing flames shoot from the roof around 5:30pm. It was then, he says, that discussions began about evacuation orders. At that point, it was clear to any onlooker with a basic understanding of battery fires that the impacted batteries had entered “thermal runaway,” a rapidly escalating chain reaction in lithium-ion batteries that can potentially lead to a fire or explosion. When it reaches this stage, there is so much heat it’s impossible to extinguish using water, as was the case at Moss 300. Additionally, applying water could put undamaged batteries at risk by causing them to short out; Mendoza and his colleagues could not fight the fire, only monitor it. The county issued evacuation orders for the Moss Landing area at 6:30pm. The fire burned, then smoldered, into the night and the next morning. County officials held an online emergency meeting at 8:30am the next day, then another at 2pm Top: In the days after the fire, Brian Roeder founded Never Again Moss Landing, a community group for residents to share information and resources. Bottom: Angie Roeder, who lived in Prunedale at the time of the fire, experienced symptoms from exposure to its smoke and fallout. Her family has since moved.
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