“Our true goal is to guarantee safety for the community,” Assemblymember Dawn Addis said a week after the Moss Landing lithium-ion battery storage facility in Monterey County caught fire – and not for the first time – on Jan. 16. So alarmed was Addis that she introduced a bill that would “prohibit the authorization of a development project that includes a battery energy storage system capable of storing 200 megawatt hours or more of energy” if the site “is located within 3,200 feet of a sensitive receptor or is located on an environmentally sensitive site.”
A “sensitive receptor” is any type of home, school, daycare center, playground, a community center, a hospital, a nursing home … and on and on – all the obvious places where a fire spreading toxic gases could do massive damage.
The “environmentally sensitive” sites make up a much longer list and include, again, the obvious locations that would be vulnerable to a “terrifying” mega fire that burns extra hot and is hard to extinguish – such as the Moss Landing blaze that caused officials to declare a state of emergency and evacuate 1,200 residents.
The Moss Landing site is one of the largest energy-storing battery facilities in the world, if not the largest, with separate developments operating near each other on the grounds of a working natural gas power plant. They are intended to be part of California’s future, storing energy generated by intermittent renewable sources.
But that future, long in doubt by realistic observers, is now even more hazy. The fire destroyed nearly the entire 300-megawatt battery array owned by Vistra Energy, which also owns the power plant. Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church called the fire a “Three Mile Island event” for the industry. Which seems fitting. No one died in that 1979 nuclear power accident, or was injured or even suffered adverse health effects. Yet it nearly killed nuclear power in the U.S.
Predictably, the renewables zealots are worried that the incident will boost efforts to block the rush to build net-zero carbon emission grid. Their concern about how their agenda negatively impacts humanity and the natural environment is much less so, though, an odd position for the self-appointed protectors of Earth. But then maybe the objective is more about remaking and controlling developed economies than safeguarding the environment.
Somewhat lost is the admission that, yes, a green energy future is a less pristine place than its proponents would have the public believe. They rail against oil and gas, and have been able to convince their allies in policymaking positions to make sure that fossil fuel extraction is villainized and punished.
Yet there seems to be little notice that the setback that Addis’ bill suggests for battery storage sites – 3,200 feet – is the same distance that, per California law, oil and gas wells have to be removed from homes and schools because those dirty fossil fuels are a threat to public safety.
There’s nothing magical about 3,200 feet. A distance of 3,000 feet or 3,500 feet, or 3,333 feet and 3 inches, would probably provide an almost identical degree of protection. What the public needs to get from this is that there is no magic to renewable energy, either. It, too, exacts a price.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.
