The latest fire, at the building on Vistra’s property, did far more damage than any of the previous fires. This facility did not use containerized boxes, but instead repurposed the historic turbine hall as the home for rows and rows of batteries. Many of those appear to have converted into fuel, and the resulting combustion has destroyed most of the structure, per local authorities.
“This is a flagship, capstone installation, and Vistra has some explaining to do about why it’s become a serial offender,” Wesoff said.
Misconceptions abound in wake of battery fire
Several misconceptions have circulated in local news reports in the immediate aftermath of the Moss Landing fire.
First and foremost, a few reports erroneously conflated the fire on Vistra’s property with the Tesla Elkhorn facility. The facilities sit next door to each other, and both have indeed caught fire at different times, but the current disaster unfolded at Vistra’s battery facility, which was supplied by LG Energy Solution.
“The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, an investigation will begin once the fire is extinguished,” an LG representative told Canary Media in a statement. “LG Energy Solution will closely cooperate with our client and local authorities.”
Another line of commentary has focused on the fire response, or apparent lack thereof. As the flames shot higher into the night sky, the emergency responders did not deploy fire engines to hose it down. Instead, they let it burn out, which has taken a while, because there are so many batteries to burn.
To a layperson, this may seem like a nonsensical response to a fire. But the Monterey County fire service is the most experienced in the nation at handling large battery fires, given the previous three it has dealt with, noted battery fire expert Nick Warner, co-founder and principal at the Energy Safety Response Group.
“‘Let it burn’ is a philosophical approach to managing an energy storage incident that’s been around since 2019,” he explained in an interview with Canary Media on Friday. In 2019, firefighters in Arizona opened a battery enclosure that was experiencing a fire, and an explosion injured four of them. Since then, the industry has overhauled battery designs and response techniques to minimize risk to first responders.
“We like to say ‘manage the incident,’” Warner added, since responders aren’t passively watching: They can actively manage a burning battery to reduce smoke and prevent fire from spreading.
“Once that fire got to the point where it was when the media coverage started, there’s essentially nothing the fire department can do at that point,” Warner said. “I don’t know if there’s enough water in the Pacific Ocean to spray on that building and manage that event.”
Faced with that impossible situation, “it seems like they were successful in keeping it contained and preventing injuries,” Warner noted.
A spokesperson for Vistra confirmed this to Canary Media: “All personnel were safely evacuated, and no injuries have been reported from either the initial incident or the ongoing response efforts.”
The disaster also represents a setback for the method of clustering batteries in a building enclosure instead of in modular containers, a common architecture for grid batteries. Warner cautioned against tossing out the whole category of purpose-built buildings to house grid batteries. The key, he said, was to “limit that fire load to something that is manageable.” That means cordoning off the batteries with physical barriers or distance, so that the total fuel available to a fire can’t get out of hand.
Clean energy developer REV Renewables employed this strategy at its Gateway project near San Diego, which caught fire in 2024. The design of that project helped contain the fire to one section, and firefighters were able to slow the blaze with water.
