Continuing Fire Problems – Watts Up With That?

From MasterResource

By Kennedy Maize

“The Monterey County Board of Supervisors held an emergency meeting Friday morning to discuss the fire. County Supervisor Glenn Church told KSVW-TV, ‘There’s no way to sugarcoat it. This is a disaster, is what it is’.”

The world’s second largest lithium-ion battery storage facility broke into flames last week (Jan. 16) some 77 miles south of San Francisco at Vistra Corp’s Moss Landing gas-fired power plant site, prompting an evacuation order of site workers and some nearby areas. The fire initially began to subside but flared up again the next day.

Firefighters decided to let the fire burn itself out rather than trying to extinguish it. A Monterey official told Reuters, that “the best approach, according to fire staff, is to allow the building and batteries to burn.” Officials said the fire finally burned out on January 20.

CNBC reported on Friday that about 40% of the building has been consumed in the fire, whose cause remains under investigation.

The Vistra plant has 750-MW of power storage capacity, or 3,000-MWh of electric delivery, providing backup power to solar-heavy Oakland-based Pacific Gas and Electric.

When Texas-based Vistra completed the construction of the project in August 2023, it claimed Moss Landing battery storage was “the largest of its kind in the world.” Since then, it has been eclipsed by the Edwards & Sanborn Solar + Energy Storage site in Kern County, Calif., a joint Air Force and local utilities project at 875-MW and 3,287-MWh.

The Monterey County Board of Supervisors held an emergency meeting Friday morning to discuss the fire. County Supervisor Glenn Church told KSVW-TV, “There’s no way to sugarcoat it. This is a disaster, is what it is.”

The fire has also generated broader political interest. California Assemblywoman Dawn Addis (D-Morro Bay) issued a statement as the news of the fire spread. “I am deeply concerned and have serious questions about the safety of this battery energy storage plant. I will be looking for transparency and accountability for why this happened again at Moss Landing. I am exploring all options for preventing future battery energy storage fires from ever occurring again on the Central Coast,” she said. She is chair of the California Legislative Central Coast Caucus.

Prior Problems

Renewable Energy World reported that the Moss Landing battery array has a checkered history, noting that the fire broke out in the earliest, 300-MW, section of the plant. In September 2021 a software problem

caused a heat suppression system to activate and douse three 100 MW racks of batteries…,Fire crews were called, but Vistra ultimately determined there was no fire, nor did the incident cause any harm to outside systems or any personnel.

In February 2022, in the 100-MW Phase II building next door, a “second, nearly identical incident involving the early detection safety system occurred…”

California’s Big Bet

California is leading the nation in battery energy storage. No current figures are available, as the sector is growing so fast it is difficult to keep up. At the end of November 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration, California had 7.302 GW of battery storage, followed by Texas at 3.167 GW. No other state had 1 GW of battery storage. BloombergNEF reported that California saw 8,171-MW of storage from 2021 through 2023.  

That makes California a test bed for battery storage, including increasing information about fires. Lithium-ion batteries are well-known for catching on fire and utility-scale fires get a lot of attention. Bloomberg reported last week,

After several fires at large battery installations—including a 2022 blaze that briefly shut down California’s Highway 1—developers switched battery formulas so that cells are less prone to overheating.

A Prior Fire

Last May, a fire broke out at L.S. Power’s 250-MW Gateway Li-ion project near San Diego. The fire prompted evacuations and road closures in the vicinity of the plant not far from the Mexican border. The fire burned for 11 days.

The Palo Alto-based Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) tracks grid-scale battery energy storage systems worldwide. In a 2023 paper, EPRI said, “Over the last 4 years, there have been on average 10 such failure events annually, even as global battery deployments have increased 20-fold.” [1]

[1] EPRI’s research consists of:

•  Evaluation of battery cell and system failure characteristics to inform safety mitigation technologies;
• Development of incident response guidelines;
• Stakeholder safety training and education.

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This was originally posted at The Quad Report, the blog site of electricity expert Kennedy Maize. It has been slightly updated and edited.

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