From CFACT

By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

Over a year after a massive explosion at the world’s largest lithium-ion battery storage plant in Monterey County, California, ignited an inferno that burned for days, Golden State officials plan to build more such “clean-energy” facilities, ignoring the risk battery plants pose to public health and safety.

The blast sent a plume of black smoke laden with tons of heavy metals, including cobalt and hydrogen fluoride, hundreds of feet into the air, prompting authorities to evacuate nearby residents. While the cause of the explosions at Vistra Energy’s Moss Landing battery storage facility on Jan. 16, 2025, is still under investigation, scientists testing the air and water near the site are troubled by what they have found.

“Metals from the Moss Landing battery fire still linger in the region’s sediments and food webs,” notes Ivano W. Aiello, professor of marine geology at San Jose State University. “These metals bioaccumulate, building up through the food chain: The metals in marsh soils can be taken up by worms and small invertebrates, which are eaten by fish, crabs or shorebirds, and eventually by top predators such as sea otters or harbor seals.”

It was the fourth, and by far largest, fire to break out since 2020 at the Moss Landing plant and the adjacent battery energy storage facility owned by Pacific Gas & Electric. Moss Landing is 77 miles south of San Francisco on the shore of Monterey Bay, at the mouth of Elkhorn Slough.

Battery energy storage systems are an essential element to efforts – still enthusiastically pursued in California – to transition from fossil fuels to intermittent wind and solar power. Excess energy generated during windy or sunny conditions is released to the grid when wind and solar power cease producing adequate amounts of electricity. This requires lots of backup storage plants each with thousands of batteries, and therein resides the risk of fires.

While the unique design of the Moss Landing facility may have made it susceptible to thermal runaway, the eight fires that broke out last year at California battery storage plants show the potential for future blazes is widespread, says physicist C. Michael Hogan, Ph. D., founder of Earth Metrics Inc., an environmental think tank.

Hogan recently told the “California Insider” podcast that Sacramento, which has allowed over 200 battery storage plants to be built, is greenlighting the construction of at least 100 more such facilities. But the Golden State is doing this “at a massive scale” without “fully understanding the consequences “ of its action. “These [plants] are an experiment,” he noted. In the case of the Moss Landing explosion, toxic jagged cobalt microparticles were dispersed into the air. Once inhaled, these cobalt microparticles – “the width of a human hair” – can interfere with a person’s alveoli, where the lungs and the blood exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide during the process of breathing in and breathing out.

Alongside the threat to human health from direct exposure to airborne microparticles of heavy metals, levels of cobalt in the agricultural region’s soils near Moss Landing are 100 to 1,000 times above normal, Hogan points out. “And they will linger there for a century or more,” he added.

The Moss Landing facility, which was destroyed in last year’s blast, was subsidized by California taxpayers to the tune of $500 million, Hogan noted, to provide backup power for the state’s planned construction of floating offshore wind turbines.

Offshore wind “plays a key role in in the state’s goal to achieve 100% clean energy by 2045,” a California Offshore Wind Fact Sheet proclaims. To that end, the state is working on a “strategic plan to develop up to 25 gigawatts of offshore wind energy in federal waters off the California coast.” This “will require more than 1,600 floating offshore wind turbines” which will be “as tall as the Eiffel Tower.” The more floating offshore wind turbines that are installed, the more onshore battery energy storage plants will be needed, exposing nearby communities to the heightened risk of future explosions.

California is one of two dozen blue states suing the Trump Environmental Protection Agency, which last month revoked the Obama-era “endangerment finding,” according to which greenhouse gases emitted from fossil fuels endanger public health. The endangerment finding served to justify, among other things, Biden administration regulations phasing out gasoline-powered cars and banning the construction of new liquid natural gas (LNG) export terminals. Both policies have been reversed in Trump’s second term.

In his March 20 announcement of California’s lawsuit, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said of the Trump policies, “They want to make pollution great again.” He failed to mention the pollution caused by his own “clean energy.”