For Energy Storage Fire Safety, Will Perception Become Reality?
By Aaron Marks
This article was originally published in Energy Storage News
The Moss Landing BESS fire has focused attention on safety considerations and concerns, as Aaron Marks, energy storage consultant at Clean Energy Associates (CEA), takes a closer look.
This continues the regular series of exclusive Energy-Storage.news guest blog contributions from Clean Energy Associates, following January’s piece, ‘An object in motion: The US battery storage industry will keep moving,’ from Dan Finn-Foley, CEA’s director of Energy Storage Market Intelligence.
The 16 January fire at Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in Monterey County, California, brought battery energy storage back into the national conversation, and not in a way that any in the industry would prefer.
Outside observers have called the fire a ‘wake-up call’ and other battery energy storage system (BESS) facilities in California have already seen added scrutiny in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
Within the industry, though, the links to what happened at Moss Landing and the safety of energy storage as a whole are, at best, unclear.
Why the Moss Landing fire is unique
Moss Landing was a unique facility, built within the turbine hall of the old Moss Landing power plant, repurposing that existing building in a way that no other BESS has done.
Most BESS facilities today have battery racks enclosed in containers, which in addition to being less costly than freestanding buildings, are also equipped with integrated fire suppression, explosion prevention, and other safety systems which are intended to isolate malfunctioning batteries to a single container, a single rack, or even a single module or cell.
While there are a few examples of freestanding buildings used to house BESS, the vast majority were built from the ground up to conform with fire codes like NFPA 855.
What’s more, the Phase 1 system which burned in the fire was powered with nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) batteries, which are known to be more reactive than the lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries used in the vast majority of BESS installed today.
When you add in the history of safety incidents which had already occurred at the Moss Landing site, the facility would appear to be uniquely at risk of exactly the sort of incident which did happen.
Instead of a harbinger of future battery fires, Moss Landing is an outlier in a rapidly expanding fleet of significantly safer battery systems.
The factual narrative of battery safety is that stationary energy storage has never been safer. According to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the number of BESS failure incidents stayed relatively consistent between 2019 and 2023.
As the deployment rate was increasing across those years, the failure rate of BESS systems has declined significantly. Last year was an even better year, with BESS deployment higher in 2024 than it has ever been and the incident count dropping to less than half of what it had been in previous years.
While BESS is demonstrably a safer technology than ever, members of the public are seeing energy storage most where the industry wants to see it least: in news reports about fires and safety incidents.
Incidents like Moss Landing have an outsized impact on the storage industry going forward, and developers, integrators, and other stakeholders need to be proactive in managing not only the safety of their systems but also the perception of safety.
Incidents in New York show how perception can drive policy
For a broad case study on public perception of energy storage, we can look to the state of New York.
In the summer of 2023, New York saw four different energy storage incidents across three towns. These incidents were relatively minor, seeing fires (when they occurred) limited to within a single container. Even so, the reaction from locals was immediate and severe, with several towns on Long Island in New York enacting energy storage moratoria by the end of 2024.
In response to the incidents, Governor Kathy Hochul organised an Inter-Agency Fire Safety Working Group, which released its initial recommendations in February 2024. The Group’s recommended fire code changes struck a balance between improving safety and addressing key concerns which arose from the 2023 incidents while not creating significant obstacles to storage deployment.
Although the outcomes from Hochul’s working group were fairly even-handed, the moratoria and other existing obstacles to storage deployment continue to challenge developers working within New York. The state is still struggling with perception issues around lithium-ion batteries which will need to be addressed if it is to reach its 6GW energy storage target by 2030.
While California has significantly more existing storage deployment than New York, Moss Landing is already appearing to create similar outcomes as the New York battery incidents; county moratoria and new battery permitting rules are already being considered, driven by this single incident.
Broader lithium-ion publicity and human nature create further barriers
One key element driving public perception is a slate of other lithium-ion battery applications, namely micromobility. The use of e-bikes and e-scooters has skyrocketed as declining battery prices have made the vehicles more affordable; that affordability also creates a demand for even cheaper options.
Inexpensive e-bikes and e-bike retrofits that use batteries and chargers without UL testing or any other guarantees of quality are more susceptible to failures and fires, especially the chargers which may not have adequate controls or safety mechanisms.
While the risks from these unregulated batteries are real, they do not imply similar risks from reputable e-bike manufacturers, let alone utility-scale storage integrators or developers.
Both e-mobility fires and the fire at Moss Landing can serve to illustrate the key challenge when it comes to conveying the true risks of lithium-ion battery use. When isolated incidents like Moss Landing are the primary lithium-ion battery news stories that the public hears, the perception tends to be framed around fires and safety incidents.
After all, there aren’t many news stories written about the thousands of operational days when nothing happens. This exact sort of skewed perception happens throughout modern life and goes in both directions; some people may develop a fear of flying from hearing about plane crashes, though flying is statistically one of the safest forms of transportation.
On the other hand, because the average person drives a car every day and therefore normalises driving, they may find it hard to understand just how dangerous driving is.
What the industry can do
While fear-based messaging is challenging to overcome, CEA has identified several critical steps that storage developers and integrators can take to establish and constantly communicate their safety record to both local stakeholders and the public at large:
Minimise potential for future incidents:
UL9540 and UL1973 certification should be a minimum requirement for any BESS procured, and those certificates should be made a centrepiece in communication with stakeholders.
Third-party quality assurance (QA) can catch problems that would have created not only safety issues but also points of failure that could result in costly downtime – a worthwhile investment when the alternative is further confidence erosion.
According to EPRI a significant portion of system failures and downtime come from commissioning problems, so third-party QA can be a highly effective tool during commissioning as well as at the BESS manufacturing location.
Communicate mitigation efforts to stakeholders:
Developers especially have a responsibility to engage with the surrounding community and to understand what concerns and questions are arising there.
If an incident does happen, rapid response is paramount. An oft-repeated industry anecdote involves a developer letting a call about a thermal event go to voicemail, and if that did occur it’s counter-productive and should not happen again.
Developers, integrators, and industry stakeholders are intimately familiar with the risks of energy storage technology that do exist; in order to build trust with community members they must be forthright about these risks and what they are doing to mitigate them. Honesty about the risks that do exist is much less harmful than downplaying them, especially if an incident were to occur.
Apply hard-earned lessons from sibling industries:
Energy storage must heed the lessons of the nuclear industry, especially in the wake of such a high-profile event like Moss Landing. Overall, the nuclear industry has an impeccable safety track record, delivering terawatt-hours of power without incident.
However, when you combine the public’s poor understanding of the risks of nuclear power with the few incidents that did occur, the industry was bound to contract in the way it did.
The Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents convinced millions that nuclear power was dangerous, regardless of the circumstances of those incidents or nuclear power’s overall track record compared to other methods of power generation. While lithium-ion batteries are hardly the bogeyman that nuclear power was made to be, they can still suffer similarly at the hands of a bad public image.
Perception the key differentiator
Energy storage is a young industry and doesn’t benefit from decades of normalization that cause members of the public to overlook refinery fires, coal ash spills, house explosions, and other fossil fuel disasters which happen more frequently and cause more toxic chemical release and loss of life than any incidents which occur within the energy storage or solar industries.
Perception is the key differentiator, not actual statistics, and the energy storage industry has statistics on its side. Although high-profile incidents like Moss Landing are reported breathlessly, they are rare and still getting rarer.
What the industry cannot do is tout safety while ignoring easy steps towards even better safety like UL certification, third-party QA, and the use of advanced diagnostic software.
In many ways, the biases of perception are stacked against new technologies like energy storage, and the press response from the Moss Landing fire illustrates this perfectly. Stakeholders in the energy storage industry have a responsibility not only to conduct work as safely as possible, but also to advocate for the strong historical track record, showing how energy storage improves the performance of the grid by building and operating safely and effectively.
Aaron Marks is an Energy Storage Market Intelligence Consultant at Clean Energy Associates (CEA). Aaron has a decade of energy industry experience and his fields of expertise include energy policy, electricity market design, electricity market economics, and energy storage; his current focus is energy storage.
