There may be lessons to be learned by looking back on the history of Vistra’s battery energy storage facility in Moss Landing.

David Schmalz here. For this week’s cover story, I wrote about the Jan. 16 fire at one of Vistra’s battery energy storage facilities in Moss Landing—how the project got approved, the aftermath and what we can perhaps learn from it. 

I came to the subject knowing next to nothing about battery energy storage systems, aka BESS, and one thing I quickly discovered was how little had been reported about the various BESS in Moss Landing, which before the fire totaled four. 

The 300-megawatt BESS that burned, Moss 300, was the biggest such facility in the world—world!—when it came online in December 2020, and there wasn’t a single story about it in the local media then, or when it was approved in 2019. 

Some backstory: I returned to the Weekly in July 2021 after leaving in March 2019 to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. The Moss 300 project, the one that burned, first came before the county Planning Commission March 27, 2019, and then again in May. Had I been around at the time, I’d like to think I would have flagged it as something interesting to look into, but I may have missed it like everyone else. 

So in reporting this story, I wanted to establish a record of how, and when, all these battery energy storage projects got approved locally, and how they’ve been doing since. I also explored how the fire has impacted the health of some residents, the environment and the industry, and how already, the regulatory landscape surrounding battery energy storage in California is shifting. 

What resulted is this week’s cover story for the Weekly.

One thing I found interesting was how in 2018, when the CPUC approved PG&E’s application for four BESS projects—two in Moss Landing, one of which was Moss 300—the agency was trying to ensure there was enough power on the grid to meet demand in the wake of natural gas contracts that were expiring at various power plants in the state. 

Locating battery energy storage systems at underutilized industrial sites like Moss Landing Power Plant was a perfect fit, which is how it came to be that Moss Landing became a sort of guinea pig in a young and rapidly evolving industry. 

As we’ve since learned in the worst way, the design of a BESS is a critical factor in its safety, and it doesn’t seem like something that should be allowed to change without some type of public notice and scrutiny from governing bodies. 

I’d like to talk more about our society’s insatiable demand for energy, and how easy it is to become detached from its costs—not on the pocketbook, but the planet. You don’t think much, if at all, about energy when you drive your car up a hill, but you’d think about it plenty on a bike or on foot. A car with 200 horsepower—about average these days—has the muscle of 200 horses. 

That detachment is a large part of why fighting climate change is so difficult—as a society, we’ve grown accustomed to easy energy, and think little if at all about the future societal costs of driving, flying or even turning on a screen. 

That’s why battery energy storage is paramount in combatting climate change—it's a way to meet our demand for energy without cooking the planet. And despite gains made by energy-efficient appliances and buildings, energy demand keeps ticking up, especially now with the advent of AI. 

Throw a question into a Google search, for example, and the answer—now that it’s AI-assisted—consumes 10 times more energy than it did before AI. 

Google it.