Pg & e plans to reopen the battery plant near the site that has burned in a toxic fire

Four months after a massive fire fled to Monterey county in one of the largest lithium-ion battery storage facilities in the world, Pacific Gas & Electric said that it intended to reactivate an adjacent battery site by June to respond to summer energy requests.

The plan is involved in the objections of the county officials who asked that the two facilities remain offline until the cause of the January fire in the rural Mosse Landing is determined.

“I had hoped that PG & e would adopt a more transparent and collaborative approach to respond to the concerns of our surrounding communities, which are always struggling with the benefits of the biggest Bess fire (battery energy storage system) in history,” wrote the Comté de Monterey, Glenn Church, on Facebook on May 8.

“The restarting of operations before the surveys is completed and before strong emergency protocols are in place is disappointing and deeply disturbing,” he said.

PG & E installation is one of the two battery energy storage systems at the Moss landing power complex near Monterey Bay. The other belongs to Vistra Corp, based in Texas, the batteries store excess energy generated during the day and release it in the electricity network during periods of high demand, including evening hours.

The two installations have been offline since January 16, when a constituted building containing 99,000 LG battery modules caught fire, spitting toxic gases in the air and causing the evacuation of some 1,500 people.

The adjacent Elkhorn battery energy storage installation – which belongs to PG & E and maintained by the public service company and Tesla – has not burned. But it stops automatically when its safety equipment detected the fire in the Vistra building.

The installation of Elkhorn Energy Storage includes 256 Tesla stationary megapacks – experienced mainly units of container size filled with battery modules. The Megapacks, according to PG & E, are held on 33 concrete slaps when installing Elkhorn.

In a letter of May 7 to Chris Lopez, president of the Comtée de Monterey supervisor, vice-presidents of Pg & e, Dave Gabbard and Teresa Alvarado, said that “Tesla and Pg & e carried out an in-depth inspection and cleaning at the Elkhorn Facility and the intention to restart it in June 1.

After the fire, each of the megapacks was dismantled and cleaned under vacuum, and environmental surveillance was carried out on and around the site, wrote Gabbard and Alvarado.

“The installation of Elkhorn, as built, allows effective storage and use of energy,” they wrote. “As summer approaches, this power is necessary to effectively manage the requirements of the California electrical network and to protect PG&E customers against power limitations and related impacts.”

A PG & E declaration provided to Times said: “We understand that the safety and well-being of our community are of the utmost importance.” The battery installation, indicates the declaration, provides “cost savings for electric customers” and helps to “support the decarbonization objectives of the state”.

In his article on Facebook of May 8, Church, whose district includes Mosse Landing, wrote that the supervisory board on January 22 has sent a letter to PG&E and visiting that their installations do not return to the operation until “the cause of the Vissra fire, as well as a previous fire to the installation of storage of PG & E batteries, are determined and correctly treated.”

This letter, he wrote, also asked that the two companies are developing “robust emergency intervention plans-on the basis of a” worse catastrophic case scenario “involving a complete conflagration of the facilities” for the county and other agencies concerned to examine.

Although emergency intervention plans are required by law, he added, existing state standards “are limited and do not provide the level of detail or realism” which the county officials needed to ensure public security.

“In previous discussions, PG & E said that a return to service would only occur much later this year or beyond,” wrote Church.

Comté officials “expressed” the return to service and contacted the operators of the facilities to ensure that emergency plans “adequately provide for the security of the surrounding surrounding communities and the environment,” Nick Pascullli, a spokesperson for Monterey on Thursday.

“For the moment, however, the county considers that it is prudent to encourage Pg & e to delay reactivation and to continue to engage in an open and additional transparent dialogue with the county officials, the first stakeholders and the residents that we serve collectively,” said the press release.

According to a Vistra website detailing the consequences of the fire, an internal investigation is underway and the cause of the fire “remains unknown”.

An investigation by California Public Utilities Commission on fire is also underway, said Terrie Prosper, spokesperson for the regulation agency, in Times.

The Visra battery energy storage system stands on the old site of the MOSS landing center, a gas installation – originally built and operated by PG & E – whose twin packs have been equipped with the region since 1950. Vissra has acquired the factory in 2018 and has been there to give way to battery facilities, leaving the factory in 2018.

In a February press release, PG & E noted that the Vistra installations are “located next to it – but fenced and separated from the Moss Landing electrical substation”.

In September 2022, a fire ignited in a single Tesla Megapack at the PG & E’s Elkhorn, five months after the online storage system of the battery storage. The fire, supervised by the first stakeholders, was authorized to go out and had visible flames for about six hours, according to an investigation report by Energy Safety Response Group, an independent consulting company.

Pg & e, in his letter this month in the county, said that the cause of this fire was the water that had entered the megapack “due to the inappropriate installation of deflagration ventilation shield panels.” Tesla has made fixes of the 256 megapacks after the fire, the public service company wrote.

Ivano Aiello, president of the San José State University Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, leads a soil sampling at the Slough Elkhorn reserve in January. A battery supply system at the Moss landing plant, seen in the background, took fire a few days earlier.

(Mosse Landing marine laboratories from the State University of San José)

Vistra fire longer and more destructive this year has thrown a veil on the clean energy industry in California, which, in recent years, has become more dependent on renewable energies, electric vehicles and other aircraft supplied by battery while state officials are pushing considerably reducing greenhouse gas emissions warming the planet.

Vistra fire invited calls to additional safety regulations around battery storage, as well as more local control over the location of storage sites.

The firefighters allowed the screwing fire to burn themselves, citing the dangers of lithium-ion battery fires with water, which can cause dangerous chemical reactions. The fire, contained in a single building, cut for several days in mid-January.

At the end of January, the scientists of the San José State University recorded a spectacular increase in nickel, manganese and cobalt materials – used in lithium -ion batteries – in soil samples of the Soughl Elkhorn reserve, a nearby estuaire which houses several endangered species.

The damaged screw -up building – filled with burnt and not affected lithium -ion batteries – has remained volatile. On February 18, the fire reigned and burned for several hours. Vistra wrote on his website that “additional cases of smoke and thrusts are a possibility given the nature of this situation and damage to the batteries”.

“Since the fire of January 16, Vistra has attracted a private professional fire brigade on site 24/7 to monitor the Moss 300 building,” wrote the company.

This structure, an old turbine building, contained a 300 megawatts system made up of around 4,500 cabinets, each containing 22 individual battery modules, Meranda Cohn, Vistra spokesperson, in Times in an email, said. Of the 99,000 individual battery modules in the building, she said, about 54,450 burned.

“The demolition of the Moss 300 building will start once all the batteries have been removed and unloaded safely, and all the debris (concrete, steel, piping) have been removed from the site,” wrote Cohn.

In February, four residents who live near the establishment continued Vistra, PG & E and LG Energy Solution, accusing companies of not having adequate fire safety systems.

They allegedly alleged that they had been exposed to toxic smoke emissions that caused nose bleeding, headaches, respiratory problems and other health problems. Environmental lawyer Erin Brockovich works with the law firm Singleton Schreiber on the trial.

The staff writer Clara Harter contributed to this report.