Huge Moss Landing Battery Fire Still Burning
Written by Chriss W. Street
While attention was distracted by the Los Angeles wildfire, the largest lithium battery storage facility in the world is burning into the ground, spewing noxious toxic fumes and particulates into the air, and forcing evacuations as firefighters were helpless to stop it.
The lithium-ion battery fire that broke out at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility owned and operated by Texas based Vistra Energy sits on the site of a closed natural gas-fired power plant.
A local state of emergency was called on Thursday with 2,000 emergency evacuations that lasted through Saturday. With the fire smoldering, Coast Highway remains closed.
Battery energy storage systems (BESS) have been praised as the pinnacle in smart living by Gov. Newsom and his Green New Deal advocates. The huge Moss Landing BESS plays a massive role in stabilizing the currency flow across California's electrical power grid that is now dominated by intermittent solar and wind energy sources.
Monterrey County Supervisor Glenn Church told local KSBW-TV: "There's no way to sugarcoat it. This is a disaster, is what it is.” The county has emphasized that their priority issues are the safety of the community and first-responders.
Vistra Energy had just completed the third phase of what they praised as an expansion to enhance California's electric grid by increasing storage capacity at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility to 110,000 battery units with a capacity of 750 megawatts.
Communities where lithium is mined tend to suffer dire health and ecological issues due stemming from the toxicity of alkali-metals. But its use has grown by 200% annually in the last decade due to residential, commercial, and utility scale batteryapplications.
Most BESS commercial systems consist of multiple lithium-ion battery cells, with each battery cell (7 x 5 x 2 inches) storing a dense 350 whr (waste heat recovery energy units). But there are high risks associated with lithium cells experiencing “thermal runaway”, which causes them to release very hot and flammable toxic gases.
Failure of one lithium cell in a large BESS storage system tendsto quickly cascade to include hundreds of individual cells, risking explosions from the hot flammable gases.
California fire-fighters conduct extensive training to respond to explosive scenarios. But the standard operating procedure fighting a battery energy storage system fires, is to let it burn out on its own.
It is unknown how long the fire will last. The flames subsidedover the weekend, but the massive facility continues to smolderand The Coast Highway is still closed.