Vistra’s Moss Landing grid battery is on fire yet again

It happened yet again.

Another plume of smoke rose from Vistra’s Moss Landing battery plant Friday morning, a year and a half after a catastrophic fire wrecked the grid storage facility in Northern California.

Vistra built Moss Landing on the California coast, south of Santa Cruz, to supply grid capacity to the greater Silicon Valley region. It was the world’s most powerful grid battery when it came online in 2020, with 300 megawatts/1,200 megawatt-hours packed into a former gas turbine hall. That unique design — which is out of step with current energy-storage best practices — came back to haunt Vistra when those batteries turned into fuel for a January 2025 fire, which had been preceded by multiple smaller safety incidents.

Now, like an overdone horror franchise that resurrects its villain ad nauseum, Moss Landing is on fire again.

Vistra has been working on demolishing the site, which entails laboriously removing the intact batteries still in the building, de-energizing them, and shipping them for recycling or disposal. Workers have already extracted 34,000 battery modules, and hoped to finish extracting the last 5,000 modules later this year — those batteries may carry some residual charge.

A statement from Monterey County said the new fire ​“involves batteries that were previously damaged” in the January 2025 blaze, but stressed that it is ​“not comparable” in size. Officials anticipate the fire may burn out ​“over the next 24 hours,” per the statement.

Vistra did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Utility Pacific Gas & Electric operates grid infrastructure next door to Vistra’s Moss Landing site. A spokesperson confirmed that the fire did not start on, or spread to, PG&E property. The utility took its adjacent Elkhorn battery plant offline after the 2025 Vistra fire to assess damage and plans to resume service there on July 1, 2027.

Authorities have issued shelter-in-place orders for the surrounding area — a seaside community that gives way to strawberry fields and other farmland farther inland. For locals, who are drawn to the area’s frolicking sea otters and cavorting whales, fires at Moss Landing have become a surprisingly regular occurrence

“It seemed like once a year there’d be some smoldering going on,” said David Robinson, who witnessed the latest plume from his boat in the nearby harbor. ​“Then of course the big fire last year pretty much shut everything down. … Now it’s like, man, when is this going to end?”

The January 2025 conflagration stoked concern nationwide about the safety of batteries. Developers looking to build batteries elsewhere commonly have to address fears that these installations will bring a Moss Landing–style fate to their neighbors.

That said, Moss Landing’s fire vulnerabilities are rooted in designs that have fallen out of use by battery developers. Vistra used a less-stable battery chemistry than today’s installations, and it was designed in a way that is not up to current safety standards.

Whereas Vistra opted to reuse the former turbine structure, which it owned, storage developers today build large batteries using array of modular containers that are carefully spaced out in a field. They are designed to fail safely, so that if one container catches fire, it cannot propagate to the rest of the facility.

Battery chemistries have evolved, too. Moss Landing used the potent nickel-manganese-cobalt lithium-ion recipe that was handed down from the electric vehicle industry. Since then, the stationary grid-storage industry has become a large enough buyer that manufacturers have built dedicated factory lines for cells optimized for that use. The industry has by and large switched to lithium ferrous phosphate, a safer chemistry that gives up some of the energy density valued for automotive batteries.

Energy storage is the fastest-growing source for on-demand electricity capacity in the country. Battery growth is particularly rapid in California and Texas, where the technology helps bank low-cost solar energy during sunny hours for use once the evening comes around. This combustion-free electricity pushes down power prices, and has helped avoid shortages during record heat waves.

The latest fire does not reveal anything new about the safety of modern battery installations — but it rekindles old problems that the industry will have to continue answering for.