18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY MARCH 27-APRIL 2, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com after the fire flared up again that afternoon. The county lifted its evacuation order at 6pm on Friday, Jan. 17, after officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency deemed that the air did not pose a threat to human health. Some locals remained unconvinced. Social media was abuzz with residents reporting symptoms they attributed to exposure to the Vistra fire’s smoke plume—headaches, sore throats, metallic taste, etc. There were questions, but no answers. Then, on Jan. 27, San Jose State University issued a report that landed like a bombshell. Ivano Aiello, a geoscientist at SJSU’s Moss Landing Marine Labs who’d been studying soil sediments in the Elkhorn Slough for a decade, found that samples he and his team had taken around the slough in the days after the fire showed a “hundreds to thousand-fold” increase in nickel, manganese and cobalt, heavy metals found in the types of batteries used at Moss 300. That raised even more questions, because EPA officials had only been testing the air for gases, not the constituent particulates within the plume. And while officials from the state Department of Toxic Substances Control had run scans and collected soil and water samples Jan. 24, they hadn’t yet been analyzed. It wasn’t until Feb. 12 that Toxic Substances officials announced they had found “there are not elevated metals associated with the fire in soil.” But that announcement came with no data. On Feb. 24, the department came out with the data, but no analysis. A Feb. 14 letter the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment sent to Monterey County Environmental Health did provide analysis: Out of the eight sites the Department of Toxic Substances Control sampled, only two registered as out of the ordinary. One site had elevated levels of cobalt—60-percent higher than normal for the region—and another had hydrocarbons believed to be carcinogenic, and more soil testing of that site was recommended. The fire wasn’t done just yet: On Feb. 18 at around 6:30pm, nearly a month after the original incident, Moss 300 flared up in a previously burnt part of the facility, creating smoke and flames. Nearby residents were told to keep their windows and doors shut for the night as a precaution, and the fire didn’t peter out until around 2am. Vistra, meanwhile, had been working to neutralize the site’s inherent volatility, and on Feb. 22, a Vistra-trained team, under the supervision of U.S. EPA, started a process to “de-link” any accessible, undamaged batteries so that they were no longer connected to each other, a process that was expected to take a few weeks. On Feb. 27, six weeks after the fire broke out, Vistra hosted its fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. At about 10 minutes in, CEO Jim Burke mentioned the fire, expressing thanks there were no injuries and appreciation to the community for handling the event safely. He noted Vistra’s other two battery facilities on the site—Moss 100 and Moss 350—were undamaged, as was Vistra’s nearby 1,060-megawatt natural gas plant, and said the battery systems would remain offline until the company learned what had happened. There was no further discussion of the fire until the very end of the hourlong call, when an analyst asked about Vistra’s insurance policy for the Moss 300 facility. A Vistra representative said it was insured up to $500 million, and the company expected to collect the full amount. In 1949, as the country and the world began its post-WWII transformation, PG&E constructed the Moss Landing Power Plant, which became operational in May 1950. The plant was expanded in the decades following, and in 1998, PG&E sold it to Duke Energy, while PG&E retained ownership of the electric transmission facilities just north of the plant. Duke made some modernization improvements until 2005, and in 2006, sold the plant to LS Power Equity Partners, which a year later sold it to Dynegy, which became a subsidiary of Vistra when they merged in April 2018. That’s when things started heating up: In October 2018, PG&E got approval from the California Public Utilities Commission to purchase the energy capacity of a 300-megawatt BESS that Vistra was planning to build on its Moss Landing property. (At the same time, the CPUC approved an agreement between PG&E and Tesla that allowed them to move forward with a 182.5-megawatt BESS on PG&E’s adjacent property to the north.) Just under a year after the Planning Commission approved Vistra’s Moss 300 project in 2019, it unanimously approved PG&E and Tesla’s 182.5-megawatt Elkhorn BESS in February 2020. Then in June 2020, the Board of Supervisors approved a BESS with 85 Tesla Megapacks—a 60-megawatt project—for Apple at the California Flats solar project, near Parkfield in South Monterey County. In July 2020, the Planning Commission approved another application from Vistra to build more battery storage on its Moss Landing property, this one for four different facilities totaling 1,200 megawatts. Vistra started the first phase of that project, what would become Moss 100, in September. Vistra’s Moss 300 came online in December 2020, making it the world’s largest BESS at the time and capable of powering about 225,000 homes. “A battery system of this size and scale has never been built before,” said Vistra’s then-CEO Curt Morgan in a January 2021 statement. “As our country transiTop: Much of the burnt Moss 300 building is unstable and unsafe for crews to enter. Its demolition will be a lengthy, complicated process in order to be done safely. Bottom: At a March 3 meeting in Salinas organized by Never Again Moss Landing, concerned residents looked for answers about how to move forward from here.
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