Letters

The Moss Landing BESS fire has nothing to do with the Los Angeles fires and everything to do with building one of these battery energy storage system time bombs on Long Island.

Remember the experts and the foreign LLC promoters assuring us last year that the new battery chemistry was safe? And they told us, don’t worry, if there were a fire, it would be small and contained within the battery’s enclosure. In any case, in the “unlikely” event of a fire, there was a suppression system in each enclosure to put out any fire. Conquer your fears, said the zealots, don’t challenge the placement of a BESS — it’s essential to the (quixotic) march to zero.

And now, here we are. The raging Moss Landing BESS fire demonstrates how little the advice of the experts can be trusted. The burning batteries created a literal inferno. The suppression systems failed; the fires consumed and destroyed the enclosures. Since the firefighters allowed the batteries to burn (out of concern that the water would ignite more of the batteries), the blaze generated toxic gases for several days, including vast quantities of carbon dioxide, requiring an evacuation order.

Imagine if you had to leave your house in the next hour, not knowing when you could return. Are you ready?

Are we thinking carefully about having all of our electricity come from BESSes? Vistra, the operator of the Moss Landing facility, shut down its other two BESSes for an indeterminate time. In other words, no electricity from the destroyed BESS for a year or more, if ever ($1 billion cost); no electricity from the other two facilities for weeks, maybe months. Good thing there’s a gas-fired power plant to keep the lights on and refrigerators running, and customers like us who have paid (no choice) for two systems (alternate energy and reliable energy).

So, what promises can we next expect from the promoters who don’t live on Long Island and their useful experts? That’s easy to imagine: It will have to be the same promises as before. Of course, there will be newer batteries, better enclosures, better this, better that. Trust us, the promoters and experts will say, you must. Have confidence in our promises and ability to deliver reliable alternative energy electricity to replace the reliable electricity you now have.

Will you? Confirmation bias is a very powerful force.

Peter Paxton

Southampton