Batteries are part of the new world of renewable energy, fires and all.

Mother’s Day this year was on a beautiful day, breezy and sunny. And those conditions helped make Sunday, May 8 a historic day for California: Renewable energy sources set a new record, generating 103 percent of the power actually needed. It was a headline-making milestone.

Of course, storage is the next big milestone. How can you capture that surplus of carbon-free energy and tap into it on a rainy day? That’s where batteries play an increasingly important role, and where new technologies are vying to lead the way.

And some of them are going to have to put out literal fires along that journey. On Tuesday, Sept. 20, commuters were already stuck in traffic as the news broke of a fire in Moss Landing, where a lithium ion battery in a Tesla megapack at PG&E’s Elkhorn plant caught fire. Firefighters responded around 2am to find a battery pack in flames, and after burning for about six hours, it continued smoldering all day. Fire officials issued a shelter-in-place order for the area, urging people to stay inside and close their windows to avoid breathing in potentially hazardous fumes. Highway 1 was closed to traffic before dawn, and did not reopen until 6:50pm, more than 17 hours after the fire first started.

The 182.5-megawatt Elkhorn plant went into operation on April 18, featuring 256 Tesla Megapack battery units on 33 concrete slabs. The plant was designed and constructed jointly by PG&E and Tesla, and is maintained by both companies; PG&E owns the facility. It’s one of the largest utility-owned, lithium-ion battery energy storage systems in the world.

And it’s located next door to the world’s largest lithium-ion battery storage facility, owned and operated by Texas-based Vistra Corp. These facilities have transformed Moss Landing’s industrial center, in the shadow of decommissioned smoke stacks, into a renewable energy industrial center.

Since Vistra’s 300-megawatt facility started operating in December of 2020, firefighters have responded to two reports of smoke there in the past year, both of which shut down facility operations.

Neither Vistra nor Tesla responded to my request for an interview about what we should know when lithium-ion batteries catch fire. So I asked Richard Stedman, Air Pollution Control Officer at the Monterey Bay Air Resources District. He emphasizes that there’s a lot we don’t know, and that dose, duration and frequency of exposure all influence the potential damage from inhaling toxic components. But lithium itself is toxic, as are hydrofluoric acid and hydrochloric acid. “There are toxic and hazardous constituents in the smoke, but there’s not a really good way to measure those,” Stedman says.

Vistra’s two separate facilities and PG&E’s facility all kicked into gear relatively quietly, humming along and storing power to deliver to the grid. It’s only when there is a disaster that most of us notice they are even there. Given that there have been three firefighter responses in a year, that’s a lot of noticing – and given the health unknowns, Vistra, PG&E and Tesla owe all of us more explanation so we know what we’ve gotten into.

Still, I would rather live in the neighborhood of cutting-edge battery storage than a nuclear plant. This technology comes at a time the world is grappling with how to move away from oil and gas – also destructive, sometimes in an acute oil spill kind of way, but more insidiously in an everyday way as they cook our planet and threaten life as we know it. Other carbon-free alternatives, like nuclear, come with their own devastating worst-case-scenario risks. California lawmakers just agreed to extend the life of PG&E’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, which is situated right near a fault line in San Luis Obispo County. The plant was previously scheduled to go offline in 2025.

The big picture is envisioning a transformation of our energy supply to usable renewables, knowing that no energy source has zero risk. “We’re going to have to get off fossil fuels, and we are going to have to take some risks to get there,” Stedman says.

California’s target is to get all of its electricity from renewable sources by 2045. As we saw on Mother’s Day, we can already do that – but we need to commit to technology that lets us use it.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com