20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY MARCH 27-APRIL 2, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com tions to a clean energy future, batteries will play a pivotal role and the Vistra Moss Landing project will serve as the model for utility-scale battery storage for years to come.” Moss 100 came online amid fanfare on Aug. 19, 2021 with a ribbon-cutting celebration. Just two weeks later, Sept. 4, 2021, a smoke incident at Moss 300 led to the temporary shutdown, while Moss 100 remained online. In January 2022, Vistra announced its findings from an investigation into the incident: The water-based suppression system became armed in response to low levels of smoke, and “because of failures of a small number of couplings on flexible hoses and pipes, improperly sprayed water on battery racks… The water damaged the batteries and caused some to overheat, thus creating more smoke which, in turn, resulted in the release of more water and caused damage to additional batteries. In total, roughly 7 percent of the facility’s battery modules were damaged.” On Feb. 13, 2022, a similar incident occurred at Vistra’s Moss 100 facility, and this time, both Vistra facilities were taken offline. Meanwhile, PG&E’s 182.5-megawatt Elkhorn facility came online in April 2022. Unlike both Vistra facilities, the Elkhorn’s batteries were not in buildings—they were in an array of 256 Tesla Megapacks on 33 concrete slabs. In the early morning of Sept. 20 of that year, just over five months later, a fire broke out in one of Tesla Megapacks at the facility, prompting the closure of Highway 1 and a shelterin-place order for nearby residents. Though the fire only burned for six hours, the orders remained in effect until just before 7pm due to the risk of toxic smoke inhalation. In the infancy of battery energy storage in Monterey County, three incidents, each at a separate facility, occurred in just over a year. In 2023, newly elected District 2 County Supervisor Glenn Church, whose district includes Moss Landing, organized a meeting at the North County Recreation Center in Castroville on Sept. 20, the one-year anniversary of the Elkhorn battery fire. About seven weeks earlier, on Aug. 1, Vistra’s 350-megawatt facility in Moss Landing went online, but unlike the first two Vistra facilities, this one was outdoors, with 122 separate containers housing more than 110,000 battery modules, bringing Vistra’s Moss Landing battery storage complex to 750 megawatts total. The meeting began at 6pm, and about 100 people showed up to attend. Various county officials sat behind tables on the stage, along with multiple representatives from Vistra and PG&E. Kelsey Scanlon, the county’s director of Emergency Management, moderated the meeting, and after Church gave an overview of Moss Landing’s industrial history, the discussion turned to the recent incidents and what had been learned from them. Vistra’s Brad Masek explained the cause of the smoke incidents at Vistra’s Moss Landing facilities, and that failed couplings attached to hoses were partly to blame—they had caused water to leak on the batteries. Vistra had since replaced all the couplings, he said, making sure they were all double-threaded, and reengineered its water suppression system so that it would not just be triggered by smoke, but also by a loss of air pressure in the lines. PG&E’s Dave Gabbard said that in the one Megapack that had burned a year before, PG&E subsequently discovered that a ventilation shield on the unit had been improperly installed, dislodging valves that allowed water into the unit, causing batteries to overheat. He said PG&E identified 88 other Megapacks with a similar flaw, and quickly repaired all of them. The meeting lasted two hours. When the public was invited to ask questions, Scanlon read some aloud: “What types of hazardous chemicals may be in the air that could impact the community beyond the fence?” A representative from Vistra said based on the company’s modeling, only hydrogen fluoride could be of concern. There was no mention of heavy metals. As the meeting was wrapping up near 8pm, Scanlon announced that she was reading the last question, a “doozy”: “Based on the expansive lists presented here tonight regarding emergency backup plans, acute exposure guidelines, and customer communication guidelines, I get the feeling this battery storage system has enormous potential for grand-scale catastrophic failure with far-reaching, long-lasting impact. Is this the case?” Masek responded first, saying Vistra’s forecasts didn’t show that to be the case. Gabbard echoed that, adding that PG&E is always trying to improve its safety procedures at the Elkhorn facility. Vistra spokesperson Brad Watson chimed in last. “I have one more thing, to give you a high-level perspective,” he said, noting that a year earlier, there were 4,000 megawatts of battery storage in California, and that now there were 6,800 megawatts, enough power for 5.1 million homes. “How many incidents do you hear of the tens of thousands of megawatt hours that are being released to your grid of clean energy? It’s just important to look at a high level at how well they are operating overall. Are they perfect? No, but no system created by humanity is perfect.” On Feb. 26, about six weeks after the fire, Bay Nature Institute, a Berkeley-based nonprofit nature magazine and website, hosted an online forum about the potential impacts the Vistra fire’s fallout might have on nearby ecosystems. Moss Landing Marine Labs’ Aiello, who’d been studying marsh sediments in Elkhorn Slough for a decade, fielded questions. Aiello said that when he first went out to the slough a few days after the fire, he could see black pieces of debris scattered on the ground. Since his bombshell Jan. 27 announcement, he said rain had dissipated the metals on the surface, adding that they weren’t going away, they were just going somewhere else—in this case, the slough. A colleague described their work on a new project, authorized by an expedited permit in the wake of the fire, to collect mussels from Montaña de Oro State Park in San Luis Obispo County, acclimate them in the lab to Elkhorn Slough waters, then deploy them in nylon bags hanging off the Highway 1 bridge at Elkhorn Slough and at Moro Cojo Slough. The plan is to cycle them out every two months to see how much nickel and cobalt they accumulate. They’re trying to get a picture—and have the unique opportunity to do so— of how the metals travel and transform through the aquatic ecosystem. Aiello emphasized that the area he’d been studying was a tiny fraction of the fire’s fallout zone, and speculated the plume could have contained more than a million pounds of heavy metals. Fallout from the fire was the central theme of an event on Monday night, March 3 at the Salinas Valley Community Church. It was organized by Never Again Moss Landing, a citizen group formed in response to the fire to share information and resources. About 60 people were in attendance, and the stage was tabled with the night’s speakers. Prunedale resident Angie Roeder, whose husband Brian started NAML, spoke first. Angie said that, perhaps because of time she spent deployed in the Air Force, she had heightened sensitivity to toxins. The Roeders packed up the night of the fire to get out for the weekend, and figured when they got back everything would be fine. But Angie started experiencing symptoms the following day, and did every time she returned to their five-acre Prunedale property. Seeing others on social media reporting their symptoms, she started the Moss Landing Power Plant/Vistra Fire Symptoms page on Facebook. It gained traction so quickly, she said, that she soon made it private. “I could feel things coming on, and I’ve had lots of frustration over the years with having symptoms and reactions to chemicals and having doctors not listen to me,” she said. Vistra’s Moss 300 battery energy storage facility was unique in the world not only for its size, but that it was housed inside a structure built for something else. “A battery system of this size and scale has never been built before.”
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