What to say to Californians worried about grid batteries

This is California Wire, a weekly newsletter from Jeff St. John on the state’s clean energy transition. Subscribe to get it every Wednesday via Substack.

Hi everyone! Welcome back to California Wire. Last Thursday, I took the train up to Sacramento to participate in a panel at the California Energy Storage Alliance’s annual conference. The topic was grid-scale lithium-ion batteries, and how to reassure communities that they’re safe neighbors. 

California has more grid batteries than any state except Texas — a massive 21 gigawatts of capacity. But as battery installations have surged, so has public opposition, with city governments moving to limit or ban new battery projects.

In the past few years, a handful of high-profile fires in California have fanned fears about battery safety. Most notably, in January 2025, an installation at Moss Landing burst into flames, forcing nearby residents to evacuate — and then, just last month, it ignited again. Also last month, a fire at a much smaller battery system led to evacuations in the city of La Verne.

These incidents spread like, well, wildfire on social media, where misinformation abounds. But California needs to more than double its current battery capacity by 2045 to meet its climate goals, so it’s important that we figure out how to engage with local communities to make sure they know the facts. 

On Thursday, I and my fellow panelists talked about some ideas for how to do this. To start with, California Energy Commissioner Noemí Gallardo cited compelling new data from the Electric Power Research Institute showing a 98% decrease in lithium-ion grid battery failures across the world from 2018 to 2025, making them about as reliable as the big oil-filled transformers at grid substations. 

Of course, facts like these falter in the face of scary images of disasters like the Moss Landing fires, Gallardo said. But today’s utility-scale battery installations are built to a much higher safety standard, specifically to prevent Moss Landing–type conflagrations, as my colleague Julian Spector has reported. ​“Even though there is a minority of people saying batteries are not safe, this data shows they are,” Gallardo said. 

California last year also beefed up its battery fire-safety regulations and practices. That’s not just sound policy, it’s also smart community engagement, said Ashanti Washington, media relations director for the Reliable Grid Project. Her organization held focus-group sessions with Data for Progress in three California communities to ask who residents trust on battery safety. ​“First responders rose to the top,” she said. 

Bringing state agencies like the CEC into the permitting process can help ensure that the latest fire-safety practices are being put to use. Take the 400-megawatt Potentia-Viridi project in rural Alameda County, which won CEC approval earlier this year under its new Opt-In Certification program for energy projects seeking expedited state review. 

While some locals are leery of this kind of state intervention — in at least one instance when a developer tried to use the CEC process, it backfired — the safety expertise state agencies bring to bear can make a positive difference.

Julia Poska, communications manager for Clearway Energy Group, developer of the Potentia-Viridi project, said Alameda County officials were glad to work with the CEC, which ​“has a lot of technical understanding” through its participation in a state interagency battery-safety group. ​“They’re able to ask tough questions about safety,” and work with local fire agencies to ensure they’re prepared for emergencies. 

It helped that Potentia-Viridi is in a remote part of the county, Poska added. Batteries in populated areas are a tougher sell. Earlier this year, neighbors of a proposed 320-megawatt project in San Diego County protested so much, the developer abandoned its efforts. Still, other projects have been able to win local support in even more densely populated areas.

Talking up the clean energy benefits that batteries deliver can also help convince neighbors to get on board, said Miranda Ehrlich, senior campaign director at Greenlight America, a nonprofit that supports community organizing on behalf of clean energy. ​“We’ve seen projects succeed as a result,” she said. 

In Chino, the city council flipped last month from opposing a 400-MW battery project not far from a city park to approving it, after the developer made a host of safety commitments. Labor unions and clean energy supporters also voiced support, and Chino Valley Fire Chief Dave William affirmed that his department has been ​“very well-trained” to respond to battery emergencies.

My take

Local opposition to clean energy projects is a major problem. But we can’t write off opponents as just NIMBYs or peddlers of social-media disinformation. People have legitimate public-safety and environmental concerns about batteries, even if new projects are very unlikely to burst into flames. And communities near polluting fossil-fuel facilities are justified in worrying that a nearby battery project might impose more environmental injustices. 

I shared a few of my own ideas during the panel: helping media outlets access relevant data under tight deadlines after there is some kind of accident, and bringing more transparency into how safe modern battery facilities really are. Hey, why not station webcams that stream 24/7 footage of batteries just sitting there, not bursting into flame? 

What else I’m watching 

In other lithium news, this week Inside Climate News published an ambitious article on the race to extract that mineral from the environmentally degraded Salton Sea, an inland lake that overlays one of the world’s largest lithium deposits trapped in hot underground brine. 

Under the state’s Lithium Valley Vision plan, billions of dollars are being invested in facilities to mine and process the lithium and also capture the region’s geothermal power potential. But Inside Climate News and Columbia Journalism Investigations remind us that the region’s deep-pocketed water-rights holders stand to benefit the most from that development, even as local residents who suffer high rates of poverty struggle to pay for clean drinking water. 

By the numbers

This chart, from the EPRI battery safety report mentioned above, has some scale problems: The bars representing how many battery failures happen per year are way bigger than the rising blue curve showing how fast battery deployments are growing. So pay attention to the orange line showing ​“failure incidents per deployed GWh.” That’s the line that tells the important story, which is that far fewer batteries are failing even as grid battery deployments are experiencing hockey-stick growth. 

Happenings

Don’t forget, tonight starting at 6:00 p.m., I’ll be hanging out with Canary Media Managing Editor Wendy Becktold at Drake’s Dealership in downtown Oakland. (Drake’s is a great brewpub with outdoor seating, not a used-car lot, in case you were wondering.) It’ll be a super-casual affair, with great food, great drinks, and great conversation. Come on by! 

You can also catch me, along with many climate and energy luminaries, at our Canary Live Bay Area event on Nov. 10 in Berkeley. Hope to see you there!

And a quick programming note: Starting next week, this newsletter will be published on Thursdays instead of Wednesdays, all in the interest of bringing you the freshest news! 

Photo of the week

No water is too cold for Lily the corgi — as long as there’s a stick to swim out to fetch. She particularly loves swimming at Point Isabel, which brings together glorious views of the San Francisco Bay with some of the happiest dogs on earth. (She’s less enthusiastic about the other regular feature of our visits to Point Isabel — getting her nails clipped at Mudpuppy’s — but they do a great job of it.)