As anyone who has ever witnessed an electric vehicle fire can attest, it is extremely difficult to extinguish a lithium ion battery fire and it requires an unholy amount of water to do so. AP News just reported the following:
MOSS LANDING, Calif. (AP) — Hundreds of people were ordered to evacuate and part of Highway 1 in Northern California was closed early Friday after a major fire erupted at one of the world’s largest battery storage plants.
The fire started Thursday afternoon and sent up towering flames and black smoke, and about 1,500 people were instructed to leave Moss Landing and the Elkhorn Slough area, The Mercury News reported.
The blaze was still burning early Friday with some containment and it had not gone beyond the facility, according to Monterey County spokesperson Nicholas Pasculli. As of late Thursday, a few dozen people were at a temporary evacuation center and the rest had gone to friends or family or made other arrangements, Pasculli said.
The Moss Landing Power Plant, located about 77 miles (about 124 kilometers) south of San Francisco, is owned by Texas-based company Vistra Energy and contains tens of thousands of lithium batteries. The batteries are important for storing electricity from such renewable energy sources as solar energy, but if they go up in flames the blazes can be extremely difficult to put out.
“There’s no way to sugar coat it. This is a disaster, is what it is,” Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church told KSBW-TV. But he said he did not expect the fire to spread beyond the concrete building it was enclosed in.
The county Board of Supervisors planned an emergency meeting Friday morning to receive a briefing on the fire.
There were fires at the Vistra plant in 2021 and 2022 that were caused by a fire sprinkler system malfunction that resulted in some units overheating, according to The Mercury News.
It was unclear what caused this latest fire. Vistra said in a statement that after it was detected, everyone at the site was evacuated safely. After the fire is out, an investigation will begin.
“Our top priority is the safety of the community and our personnel, and Vistra deeply appreciates the continued assistance of our local emergency responders,” Jenny Lyon, a spokesperson for Vistra, said in a statement.
North Monterey County Unified School District announced that all schools and offices would be closed Friday due to the fire.
Note that the Moss Landing Power Plant is located right on the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary—a rich and highly sensitive ecosystem full of all kinds of marine life, including the endangered California sea otter. When I lived in Carmel in 2010, I spent many happy mornings kayaking in the adjacent Elkhorn Slough, often referred to as “one of California’s last great coastal wetlands.” I suspect the Elkhorn Slough will be horribly polluted by the toxic material being released from this fire.
As has been long understood, California’s stunning ineptitude at managing the state’s fires has resulted in far more greenhouse gases being released than the entire phony-baloney “green energy industry” has ever even begun to save.
As the authors noted in a 2022 paper in the journal Environmental Pollution (Up in smoke: California’s greenhouse gas reductions could be wiped out by 2020 wildfires)
In this short communication, we estimate that California’s wildfire carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions from 2020 are approximately two times higher than California’s total greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions since 2003.
California’s priority should be FIRE PREVENTION, and not mind-bogglingly stupid measures such as banning gas stoves.
