After Moss Landing Power Plant reignites, officials brace for more flare-ups

Also, its a great place for bicycle rides on quiet roads. Great air (when there are no fires). Nearby horseback riding on Salinas Sunset Beach. Don't forget to have artichokes!

There’s a small Marina there where you can hire boats to go whale watching in Monterey Bay. Highly recommend doing that if you live in the area.

> My favorite restaurant in Moss Landing is currently closed

As long as Phil's Fish Market is still there.

I was going to recommend the Whole Enchilada (same owners, down the street), but it closed recently. It was always packed. I wonder what happened.

Hopefully the business makes it through this crisis.

Imagine if that area had to be strip mined, factories set up, and coal power plants built. There's nothing clean or green about renewable energy. Californians and Westerners in general should be thankful they just have to deal with things like battery fires and not the raw material extraction and solar panel production, because that's what is happening in other countries instead.

And no I'm not trolling, this sort of whitewashing out the ugly parts have contributed a lot of damage and waste from things like "recyclable plastic" which weren't actually recyclable, but everyone felt good it in a green bin next to grease soaked pizza boxes that weren't recyclable either.

ask the armed guards with bullet-proof vests arriving in PG&E trucks? (seen yesterday at a nearby construction site)

It is toxic, but fortunately has a rather short half life compared to many other environmental toxins.

Other than burning lithium ion battery plants, the other major source is burning coal.

Fluorine is in every lithium ion battery.

My understanding is that get the electrical interconnections can be more difficult than the actual plant construction. Building adjacent to existing generation means those connections already exist. Same reason that supposedly solar and wind are being built up on old coal plants.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me if it's a demand response generator (peaker)...

If demand is low, charge batteries. If demand is high, drain batteries. If demand is higher than batteries can sustain, run gas. If there's a subsidy for putting battery electric power on the grid, when batteries are low and demand is also low, run gas to charge batteries locally and then supply that to the grid later to get the subsidy.

Only the last part requires colocation, but it's probably easier to get one power plant parcel zoned and one power plant hooked up to the grid, and having both energy storage and a gas peaker together might bring it up the connection prioritization list because it addresses multiple problems for grid operation.

A peaker gas plant basically fulfills the same function as a grid battery.

The grid is built to have a peaker plant there, and it’s operated by a company that bids for generation at this location and has experience in it.

I think it more than makes sense.

I assume the purpose is to store the excess generated power for high demand times.

Could you pass environmental review on a new site? Besides, putting it anywhere else would ruin that place’s community and cause gentrification.

Isn't the big problem with extinguishing them that they supply their own oxygen?

We need a different battery chemistry.

They're an absolute pain in the rear to deal with, because they're self igniting, and it propagates between cells.

Your typical lithium 18650 - vape cell, old laptop cell, whatever you know it as (18mm diameter, 65mm length, cylindrical), has a high end capacity of around 3500mAh - so 3.5Ah (amp-hours - so will take an hour to drain at 3.5 amps, 3.5 hours to drain at 1 amp, handwave goes here). At 3.7V nominal, that's around 13 Wh (watt-hours, a measure of energy capacity).

As a first order handwave, when a cell runs away and burns off all the materials in it (electrolyte, plastic separators, etc), you'll get about twice the energy out of the cell as the electrical capacity - so, ballpark, 25Wh for a fully charged 18650 running away. Except, it doesn't run away in an hour. It runs away in about 30 seconds, so doing the math on that, you end up with about 3000 watts for those 30 seconds. That, meanwhile, can heat nearby cells up enough to cause them to enter thermal runaway, and the whole pack will just go, until cooled sufficiently.

"Dumping a lot of water on the pack" will, generally, cool it down enough to stop this. Assuming you can get the water where it needs to be, and in something like a shipping container battery, that's far from given.

At this point, you've got a damaged battery, in unknown condition, with none of the existing current paths able to be relied on, and probably new current paths that may or may not exist yet (water, metal, corrosion, and those paths are often high resistance and slow to form, which creates a lot of heat). It's not really safe to disassemble it or work on it until things have been discharged, because if the pack has energy left in it, it's prone to do exactly what this article talks about - reignite, later, inconveniently.

As far as disassembling it, would you go work in a few megawatt-hours of energy, in unknown configuration, with the state of the safety systems unknown, in a charred environment of unknown toxins (what you get out of a runaway is far from predictable, beyond "generally unfriendly to humans")?

It sounds silly, but if the pack is confined and the fire isn't going to spread to other packs nearby (which is why they tend to be quite spread out), the safest thing to do really is to let it burn to completion. At that point, if it's actually burned out, there's no energy left in the cells to do anything terribly nasty, and you've burned off most of the electrolyte and such.

Anyway, the right answer is lithium iron phosphate for grid scale energy storage, but even those can catch fire if water gets in the wrong places, and they will, with enough prodding, burn.

What nobody talks about is that much of the lithium electrolyte in lithium ion batteries is in the chemical form of lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF6).

Burning produces nontrivial amounts of hydrogen fluoride and clouds of hydrofluoric acid. In the short term, these are horrifically toxic (reactive). They'll bond with just about anything, including etching glass. The impact on living tissue is nightmarish and unlike some other strong acids, protracted because it absorbs rapidly through skin and starts substituting things in your biochemistry.

There are also a variety of other excitingly unstable fluorinated compounds floating around.

I have a suspicion that at some point we're going to stop talking about "Hey it's a fire that won't go out, we have to use too much water, our tanker trucks aren't equipped for this" and start talking about "Hey it's a fire that boils off what is very nearly a chemical weapon. Evacuate a mile downwind and let it burn". And then we're going to ban the more fire-prone chemistries in stationary and vehicular applications. What event is going to trigger that? I think the most likely thing is a mass casualty event in a deep tunnel traffic jam where the pileup ends up igniting.

Obligatory reading: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-tou...

And on this specific threat: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-09784-z

The bipolar treatment is generally Lithium Carbonate. The product of burning lithium is Lithium Oxide. I doubt it has the same effects on a person when inhaled

Bear in mind that lithium has some unpleasant side effects. So if you don't need it, it's... not great.

It seems unlikely that it is inhaled, especially its burned form, when used as "mood stabilizer and antidepressant"

I don't know why you're being downvoted, it's a reasonable question. The lithium cation is the bioactive part and the smoke will produce it when the particles are dissolved in water.

But the basic answer is that lithium is fairly ubiquitous in the environment and it has biological effects only at fairly substantial doses. I think the usual therapeutic dose is above one gram of lithium carbonate per day.

The most likely product here is lithium hydroxide, which is caustic. The smoke also contains more dangerous substances such as carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide from burning plastic. So, I'd wager you'd be dead or seriously injured long before you feel any cognitive effects.

Lithium also doesn't bioaccumulate, so any small amount that gets in your body will be cleared fairly quickly - probably within a day or two.

In essence, I'd stay clear of the smoke, but not because of the mood-related effects.

You don't hear too many stories of people lighting lithium batteries on fire intentionally and inhaling the results (compare with nitrous, paint fumes, air duster, etc.), so I'm guessing there's not much there.

The battery packs are Tesla Megapacks, as was celebrated when the facility opened in 2022

https://investor.pgecorp.com/news-events/press-releases/pres...

If politics played a role, it's the convenient omission of this in the linked article while the owner/operator company was named.

[edit]: Nope, I'm wrong per reply below. There is a 2022 Tesla array at Moss Landing, but apparently the one that caught fire was an older 2020 array with LG batteries. Read the article below instead, the chemistry and designs for large battery arrays changed a lot in those years, and looks like we're seeing "safety standards are written in blood" play out live here.

musk turned anti-CA. but also, if you read the article, the plant is owned by a company in texas.

>Vistra Corp, the Texas-based company that owns and operates the facility,