A Tale of Two Counties & Two Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS)
On a recent podcast with Nate Hagens, “The Future is Local,” Daniel Christian Wahl explained that we can’t solve our problems nationally or internationally. We need to approach problems regionally, watershed by watershed. If you believe that you’re part of life, and that what you do to the tree of life you do to yourself, then you have checks and balances that prevent you from invading your neighbor’s bioregion. Rather than compete for resources, we can educate ourselves about respecting living systems.
While I dream of re-orienting regionally, national and international events clamor for attention. In January, 2023, for example, AES Corporation submitted a permit application to build a 700-acre solar and battery energy storage system (BESS) in Santa Fe County, New Mexico. Here’s a summary of the last two months’ developments.
SANTA FE COUNTY COMMISSION
On December 4th, 2024, the county held a hearing about AES Corporation’s proposal to build a 680-acre solar and battery storage facility near Rancho Viejo, Eldorado and San Marcos.
AES said that the county needs this solar and BESS facility to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and fight climate change.
Neighborhood associations voiced support for these aims—when they’re done safely. They showed that since BESS facilities frequently fail, including ones built and/or operated by AES, AES’s proposal is not safe. Using chemistry provided by AES, an electrician with the Clean Energy Coalition (CEC, a neighborhood association) calculated that if fire at the proposed site escaped a battery container while the area endured 13 mph winds (typical for this area), fire would travel one mile in 25 minutes.
AES countered that this electrician’s calculations were incorrect.
The electrician noted that AES had redacted much info about its batteries’ contents. He had done his best with the information available.
AES said, “That information is proprietary.”
An attorney with the CEC questioned why, as its website reports, AES Corporation opted to pay $30 million in fines for worker hazards and environmental violations—rather than correct its behavior.
AES objected to the question.
During the public comment period, a mother pleaded for this solar and battery facility. She said, “climate change is the big picture. We must give our children a future and address climate change.”
On December 22nd, 2024, Hearing Officer Marilyn Herbert recommended that the Santa Fe County Planning Commission deny AES’ proposal. Twenty-five thousand people live near the proposed facility. Hearing Officer Herbert wrote, “over 200,000 panels and 570,000 lithium-ion batteries, together with the proximity to residential communities with homes as close (as) 500 feet from the Site boundary create an unreasonable risk to the safety and welfare of the communities.”
MONTEREY COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
On January 16, 2025, Vistra Corporation’s battery energy storage system (with a 4,000 megawatt hour capacity, possibly the world’s largest BESS) in Moss Landing, California, 70 miles from San Francisco, caught fire for the fourth time in three years. This time, eighty percent of the system’s lithium-ion batteries went up in toxic smoke.
Officials evacuated 1700 nearby residents and closed roads, schools and businesses.
The EPA said, “We don’t know what toxins to look for.” By the time they studied the air, toxins had dissipated, and the EPA found that the fire caused no health risk.
Nearby residents reported breathing problems, rashes, headaches and other problems.
After this BESS fire, in a nearby reserve, scientists from San Jose State University found heavy metals at the surface of soil, 100-1000 times normal levels.
Monterey County Commissioner Glenn Church said that this fire occurred even though protocols were followed exactly. He called the fire “a Three Mile Island event for this industry.”
SANTA FE COUNTY, NEW MEXICO
The Santa Fe County Planning Commission held hearings on February 3rd and 4th, 2025. AES Corporation insisted that its lithium-ion batteries and safety features are different from the ones that caught fire at Moss Landing and at other failed BESS facilities. AES promised that it has eliminated potential fire risks. Atar, a professional engineering firm that carries liability for its reports, agreed with AES’ claims.
The Sierra Club, Santa Fe Green Chamber of Commerce and 350.org all voiced support for AES’s project. During the public comment period, one woman said she much preferred a BESS fire to a climate change fire.
Ashley Schaunauer, retired senior Hearing Officer for New Mexico’s Public Regulatory Commission, explained that Santa Fe County lacks an emergency response plan. It lacks a hazardous material response plan. It does not have staff trained to deal with a BESS fire, should one occur. While AES’s application addresses risks to the facility’s workers, it does not address the corporation’s history of accidents or risks to natural gas transmission lines. It does not consider lithium iron phosphate batteries, which have more stable chemistry than the lithium-ion batteries AES proposes using.
The Planning Commission voted six to one in favor of permitting AES’ proposal.
In March, the Santa Fe County Board of Commissioners will vote about permitting AES’s project. Whoever loses the case will likely appeal it to district court.
UNADDRESSED SOLAR ISSUES
While most of the discussion about AES’s proposal centers on problems with battery energy storage systems, solar panels also pose hazards. Manufacturing their silicon wafers requires burning fossil fuels and trees and mining quartz. Making the wafers electronically conductive requires hundreds of chemicals and guzzles water. The panels are coated with PFAs in four places. When panels crack, their chemicals can leach into the ground. Every substance that goes into making the panels, their glass covers, their electrical wiring and mounts requires intercontinental shipping. At the end of their usable lives, solar panels are hazardous waste. If we look from cradle-to-grave, we can’t rightly call solar PVs (or batteries) “clean,” “green” or “renewable.”
I notice that everyone involved in discussions about solar and BESS facilities believes that their survival is threatened—either by climate changes and/or by potential fire hazards and leached toxic chemicals.
In Sandoval County, New Mexico, another proposed solar and BESS project (on 1833 acres with110 megawatts of battery storage) has drawn opposition.
At this time, what does living within our ecological means look like?
MORE HEADLINES
Historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, author of More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy, says, Forget the energy transition: there never was one and there never will be one.
On December 24th, AES Andes, a subsidiary of AES Corporation, began taking steps to build a massive industrial complex near the Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacam Desert, the world’s darkest and clearest astronomical observatory. AES’ facility would include thousands of electricity generation units, a port and ammonia and hydrogen production plants. The European Southern Observatory’s general director, Xavier Barcons, says, “The proximity of the AES Andes industrial megaproject to Paranal poses a critical risk to the most pristine night skies on the planet. Dust emissions during construction, increased atmospheric turbulence, and especially light pollution will irreparably impact the capabilities for astronomical observation.” The Observatory is urging AES Andes to relocate the project further from the Paranal Observatory to preserve the region’s dark skies.
February 5, a massive fire exploded in Poland at a facility housing 1300 e-bikes and additional spare lithium-ion batteries. It took over 150 firefighters 28 hours to battle the flames, while authorities warned residents to stay indoors to avoid the toxic smoke.
GOOD NEWS!
In Kentucky, activists bought a prison site to rewild the land.
Essential Services Must Be Accessible A group of Belgian and French sociology professors and a Spanish doctor who heads the movement "Soy Mayor, no soy idiota" (I am older, I am not an idiot), have drafted an open letter to the European Commission, Council and Parliament. They call for human, non-digitized access to civil, postal and other services. (40 % of Europeans lack digital skills.) They call for a democratic debate to decide to what extent digitalization should be used.
At grocery stores, in schools and hallways, I notice people sharing their vulnerability and voicing appreciation for each other. I am so grateful.
Would you buy me a cup of tea each month?
It's insane to see people sacrificing their own lands to this global project of so called energy transition. What the carbon-reductionists still refuse to admit is that climate change is as much caused by human land degradation as human carbon emissions. The people of Santa Fe will never feel whatever marginal contribution to carbon reduction, if any, the solar plant accrues to them, while their own home territory will be made that much hotter, drier and more extreme. When it comes to climate, thinking is treated as denial.
It is a shame to see yet another piece showing that Katie Singer has become a hatchet-writer for the fossil fuel industry…
…aggressively criticizing cleaner energy generation forms, without any honest comparison or context… along the way, making it clear that she is a neophyte in this area and someone apparently lacking In relevant technical background/abilities.
Honestly, one should stop readying as soon as Nate Hagans is mentioned — a self-promoting nitwit and prolific purveyor of paralytic fatalism through half-truths, closely parallelling fossil fuel loyalists like Mark Mills and Art Berman.
In this latest piece, for example, two cherry-picked examples are attacked, with apparently deliberate omission of critical context.
No mention that comparable-sized conventional fossil fuel systems cause greater harm, year after year.
No mention of the fact that the Martinez refinery fire in February 2025 was more harmful than anything that happened at Moss Landing, and that there were four other major refinery fires, in other locations, at that same time!
No mention that the Moss Landing site's Lithium-Ion system is an older technology system in a technology field that is still in its infancy, and that newer systems eliminate almost all of those risks, and that there are alternative grid-storage systems that have essentially no public risks at all.
No mention of the fact that grid storage systems are, overall, extremely successful, and FAR safer than peaker plant systems, around the world, and including California, where grid storage systems are credited with reducing power outages (which can cause public health emergencies of many kinds, including water shortages and health risks from heat and cold)) AND reducing wildfires initiated by power-lines.
Honestly, it is — at this point — a despicable disservice to humanity to write half-baked, one-sided cherry-picked hit-pieces about clean energy systems, when the harms of petroleum/fossil-fuel systems are literally killing nature around the planet and putting human civilization at risk.
There is, of course, no approach that can eliminate the need for humans to use less energy and less natural resources — due to humanity's current state of extreme ecological overshoot and the accelerating impacts of global heating. Degrowth is necessary.
But the most urgent priority it to eliminate fossil fuels and other petroleum products — no matter what — through demand reduction and alternative energy generation... and a rapid transition to cleaner energy systems is critical to those necessary steps for survival of human civilization.
There will be rough spots, but — so far — none of those rough spots is anywhere near as harmful as the fossil fuel systems that alternatives are attempting to replace.