Board hears safety, siting and coordination questions after Moss Landing battery fire

County officials and energy industry representatives told the Board of Supervisors on March 11 that battery energy storage systems (BESS) are an important tool for grid reliability but raised new safety and permitting questions after the recent fire at the Moss Landing facility.

Central Coast Community Energy Chief Executive Robert Shaw told the board that California needs large amounts of storage to integrate intermittent renewables and that the industry is shifting toward lithium‑iron‑phosphate (LFP) chemistry, which he said is less prone to thermal runaway than older chemistries. Shaw also said the Electric Power Research Institute’s incident database shows emergency responses to BESS incidents are rare and that standards and incident rates have improved as the technology and regulations evolved.

The county’s Fire Marshal, Greg Tan, described technical differences between the Moss Landing installation and newer systems proposed or…