Questions for commissioners voting on a proposed battery energy storage system (BESS)
Consider me part of the group overwhelmed by our society’s daily changes. I’m also overwhelmed by news that does not make it to the headlines. I just talked to a cousin who lives in the Bay Area, and he did not know about the fire that erupted at the lithium-ion battery energy storage system (BESS) in Moss Landing, California on January 16, 70 miles from his house. He hadn’t heard about the BESS fire’s toxic fallout or forced evacuations.
In Santa Fe County, New Mexico, most of the people I know have not heard about AES Corporation’s proposal to build a 700-acre solar and lithium-ion BESS facility here.
Indeed, new technologies thrive—new technologies including BESS, DeepSeek AI, crypto currencies, data centers to power the AIs, power plants including “renewable” and nuclear systems to power the data centers and crypto currency “mines.” Information about their cradle-to-grave ecological hazards keeps hidden.
MAKING CRADLE-TO-GRAVE REALITIES VISIBLE
To reduce fossil-fuel use, corporations now commonly propose installing large-scale solar PV or wind facilities with backup battery energy storage (BESS). Corporations call these facilities “green,” “clean,” “sustainable,” “renewable” and/or “zero-emitting.” These are marketing terms. In reality, manufacturing anything—including solar PVs, industrial wind, battery energy storage systems, e-vehicles, data centers and power plants of every kind—requires fossil fuels, mining ores, smelting, refining, enormous amounts of water, chemicals, intercontinental shipping of raw materials…and generates worker hazards and toxic waste. These processes usually remain invisible to the public, even when they destroy wildlife habitats and/or harm human health. At their end-of-life, solar panels are hazardous waste. Like industrial wind turbines, they do not biodegrade. The public rarely sees waste sites.
The public rarely gets information about these technologies’ fire hazards.
PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING
In a society driven by profit, how/can we prevent technology’s hazards to wildlife habitats, indigenous communities and public health?
Professional engineering protocols offer the best safety mechanisms I know. To clarify, professional engineers (PEs) evaluate bridges, electrical power stations, water treatment facilities and other new projects. These subject-matter experts provide certified reports that all hazards have been mitigated and that projects are safe to go live—or not. PEs carry liability for their reports.
Today’s substack focuses on battery energy storage. It’s time to make BESS hazards visible. Given these systems’ numerous failures, including Vistra Corporation’s January 16, 2025 BESS fire at Moss Landing, every commissioner voting to permit a new BESS project should require that the project developer provide satisfactory answers to the following questions:
#1 Please show us your plan to fight possible battery fires.
#2 Has a professional engineer (PE) “sealed” this report?
#3 Does our fire chief concur with this plan?
#4 In the event that you (the corporation) go bankrupt, would you post a bond so that the county is not responsible for disposing of your facility’s hazardous waste?
If commissioners do not respect these questions, then I don’t know what’s possible.
HEADLINES RELATED TO VISTRA’S BESS FIRE AT MOSS LANDING
The Vistra BESS at Moss Landing is one of the largest battery energy storage systems in the world. The fire that started there on January 16, 2025 was the facility’s fourth fire in four years. 80% of its batteries burned. To prevent toxic exposures, nearby residents were evacuated. Schools and roads were closed.
The EPA said it did not know what toxins to look for.
After the fire, research scientists at San José State University's Moss Landing Marine Laboratories studied marsh soils and detected unusually high concentrations of heavy-metal nanoparticles. See KQED’s report, January 27, 2025.
Lithium-ion fires trigger a chemical reaction that releases highly flammable gases and lots of heat.
Monterey County Commissioner Glenn Church said, “We followed all protocols, and still this fire occurred. This is a wake-up call to the renewable industry.”
Fire hazards at the battery storage system coming near you.
Here’s a January 24, 2025 photo/video essay from Reinette Senum, “Burning Batteries: The Toxic truth Behind Our Green Energy Illusion. From Moss Landing to Tesla vehicles: How many sacrifices will it take to expose the lithium battery catastrophe?”
URBAN FIRES & WARS ALSO GENERATE TOXINS Gazans who returned home during the temporary cease-fire found 88% of infrastructure destroyed, and their homes no longer exist. When/if they rebuild, what kind of toxins remain in their soil?
People whose homes did not burn in the LA fires found that toxic odors make them uninhabitable.
AES CORPORATION’S PROPOSED SOLAR & BESS FACILITY IN SANTA FE COUNTY, NM: AES proposes installing a 96 MW large-scale solar facility with a 48 MW battery energy storage system in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, near Rancho Viejo and Eldorado. The County Planning Commission meets February 3, 2025 at 1:30pm at the Convention Center on Marcy Street. Four parties in favor of the project (including the Rio Grande Sierra Club, the Green Chamber of Commerce and 350.org) and four who oppose it (including the Clean Energy Coalition and Ashley Schaunauer) will each get 30 minutes to present and cross examine. You can inform commissioners (who will vote about AES’s proposed facility) your position by emailing them and Dominic Sisneros (the County AES Case Manager). Give them the professional engineering questions!
djsisneros@santafecountynm.gov
cbustamante@santafecountynm.gov
cacaristone@santafecountynm.gov
DIDI PERSHOUSE’s 2ND 'CAN WE REHYDRATE CALIFORNIA?' workshop: Intervention Points for Growing Fire Resilience Sunday, February 2nd: 10-Noon PST (1-3 PM EST). Free OR by Donation. Access the first workshop when you sign up for the 2nd one.
MY MISTAKE While writing my last substack, I got help from a physicist of fire ignition, an electrical engineer, a forensic fire investigator and an electrician. I also went to the Internet, which informed me that in the event of an outage, cell sites’ power is backed up by lithium-ion batteries. This isn’t totally correct. While 5G small cells primarily use lithium ion batteries, larger cell towers usually backup with lead-acid batteries. I apologize for this error.
EARLY FACEBOOK INVESTOR ROGER MCNAMEE Dec. 27, 2024: For 50 years, the products that came out of the Valley made us more capable. They made us more productive. That is no longer the case. And (yet, we) essentially treat everything new as though it would automatically be better than what came before. That has not been the case since the iPhone was introduced in 2007.
I think we need to change our relationship to technology.
We’re displacing workers with artificial intelligence; displacing the currency with crypto; and getting rid of any kind of taxation on wealth that might come up. The only power we have as citizens—and I think it’s a huge power—is to say, “You know what? We’re not going to use your products.”
We’ve been accepting all kinds of surveillance, all kinds of invasions of privacy and manipulation in exchange for convenience. It’s time for us to ask, “Could we do with less convenience in exchange for regaining human autonomy?” That’s a trade I made a number of years ago. I think it’s the only option that we have for at least the next four years.
There are ads in San Francisco right now about how you should not employ any more humans. You can employ A.I. instead of humans. Who does that serve?
Our children are being lured into using ChatGPT for school. Does that benefit them? It doesn’t prepare them for a future in which they’re empowered. It prepares them for a future in which they are disempowered.
Even if you thought that artificial intelligence was useful…the industry starts by stealing all copyrighted information, as well as all the personal information that all of us have in cloud services. So, that’s theft. The second problem, the really huge one, is what AI does to natural resources. Microsoft and Google’s…power consumption has gone up 30, 40, 50% over the last few years, simply to power artificial intelligence.
The same thing’s going on with water. These processing plants—both for the data and semiconductors—are consuming vast amounts of water, and the public has had no voice in this. The companies have acted unilaterally; and they’re literally talking now about restarting Three Mile Island or building floating nuclear plants.
The public really should have a voice in this.
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Thanks, Carl. I wonder what questions would open discussion about ANY technology's ecological impacts. Any ideas?
Thanks, Katie. I'm struck at how little reported this is, unknown even to the people in the area. This is symptomatic of the entire climate issue. I generally don't tend to think in terms of conspiracies or cabals, tending to see our behavior as stemming from deep seated patterns and ideas, yet this is all so neat and repetitive. What do you think is behind the suppression of information? Where do think it starts?