Why I refuse to apologize for the towering lithium fires at Moss Landing

The sky over Northern California is once again choked with the majestic, rolling black clouds of progress. Friday morning, Vistra’s Moss Landing grid battery facility erupted into flames for the second time in eighteen months. Predictably, the local residents of Monterey County have reacted with the same small-minded hysteria they always do when asked to inhale a localized catastrophic chemical event. I am exhausted by it. We demand a renewable energy grid, but the moment a utility-scale lithium-ion storage unit rapidly oxidizes its entire capacity into the upper atmosphere, suddenly everyone is a public health expert.

I was discussing exactly this lack of public resilience over a sustainable sea bass luncheon at COP last year with several key infrastructure developers. The consensus was clear: the American consumer is simply too coddled to survive the transition. When you build a massive, grid-stabilizing battery plant on the California coast, you are making a commitment to the future. And sometimes, that future involves 100-megawatt installations spontaneously self-immolating. But sure, let us halt all climate progress because a few thousand coastal residents have to tape their windows shut.

The sheer entitlement of the complaints is staggering. People are pointing out that this catastrophic blaze comes just a year and a half after the last catastrophic blaze wrecked the exact same facility. To which I say: exactly. Vistra is iterating. In the fast-paced world of green tech, a facility that only catches fire every eighteen months is practically a stranded asset. The company is actively stress-testing the thermal limits of our grid architecture, and providing a free, unscripted emergency evacuation drill for the greater Santa Cruz area.

Just last month, I sat on a panel in Davos regarding the optics of spontaneous industrial combustion. We reviewed Vistra’s latest ESG report, which brilliantly reclassified the 2022 Moss Landing fire as an aggressive local heating event. The attendees—mostly visionaries from the private equity sector—applauded the sheer bravery of it. While the public whines about the smell of burning plastic and vaporized heavy metals, the adults in the room are busy securing the necessary tax subsidies to rebuild the exact same flammable architecture. It requires a profound moral clarity to watch your flagship project burn to the ground twice and still demand a rate hike.

I reached out to Vistra’s leadership, who were understandably frustrated by the media's insistence on focusing on the flames rather than the carbon offsets generated by the facility prior to its combustion.

Hayes is entirely correct. We have to look at the bigger picture. When a coal plant burns fossil fuels, it is a tragedy for the climate. When a multi-million dollar green battery plant burns, it is just scope-three emissions with a better public relations team. If we want to move away from relying on fossil fuels to poison our communities, we have to be willing to let advanced lithium-ion arrays do the poisoning instead. It is called sustainability, and it isn't always pretty.

As we enter yet another historic wildfire season, I find myself increasingly impatient with the purity tests of the environmental left. You cannot demand utility-scale battery storage and then complain when that storage occasionally converts itself into a towering pillar of synthetic fire. We are attempting to rewire the global economy. Some minor sacrifices—a ruined coastline, a few hundred tons of airborne hydrofluoric acid, the complete destruction of a grid facility—are the price of admission. If you aren't willing to breathe in the blinding, acrid smoke of the clean energy revolution, then frankly, you don't deserve the grid at all.