Almost two years after a massive battery fire in rural Monterey County displaced 1,200 people and smoldered for days while spewing toxic gas into the air, the same facility is burning again.
Fire crews responded to a structure fire at the Moss Landing Power Plant, owned by Vistra Corp., around 6:15 a.m. Friday morning, according to CAL FIRE.
Fire officials advised residents in zones nearby to shelter-in-place until further notice, with windows and doors closed, and air conditioning systems turned off. Shelter-in-place orders for several areas were lifted around 10:30am, but they still remain in place for one zone.
The building in question had been damaged in a fire at Moss Landing back in January 2025, and Friday’s fire involved batteries that remain charged inside while the building had been taken off the grid, CAL FIRE public information officer Josh Silveira said.
The facility was evacuated and no civilians or fire personal were injured in this fire response. Fire officials on a noon press call said the fire was much smaller in scale and complexity than last year’s and it was no longer actively burning, but that conditions could change.
“At this particular point in the incident, there is no active fire. It is hot, smoldering at this particular point, but the incident is still within a scope that it could decrease or continue going,” North Monterey County Fire Protection District Chief Jess Cortez said on the call.
Officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Monterey Bay Air Resources District said on the noon call that they were monitoring for particulate matter pollution, known as PM 2.5, and hydrogen flouride but had not detected levels exceeding health screening levels.
“There’s a few [sensors] that have edged into moderate air quality, but we expect those probably to go back to green as we get better wind flow through there,” said Richard Stedman, air pollution control officer at the air district. “Basically, we’re not seeing anything that indicates that there’s a problem with air quality and would result in exposure at the facility at this time.”
The 2025 Moss Landing battery fire, which was still in the process of being cleaned up when today’s fire broke out, sparked a battery backlash in California, where state officials are pursuing an aggressive goal of 100% clean energy usage by 2045 to increase the grid’s capacity and address climate change consistent with what scientists say is necessary.
The plant, one of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery storage sites, was an older facility that launched in 2020. Experts have noted that lithium battery safety has improved dramatically in the years since it was built.
Officials last year noted cleanup would proceed slowly, because of the risks of igniting another dangerous battery fire while removing the thousands of charged batteries that remained on site.
Cortez said that there were 1,500 fully energized batteries against the north wall of the building that burned today. Crews have been working towards removing and delinking them, said Cortez, but had not been able to get to them because the wall they were against could have collapsed. “Those batteries spontaneously ignited this morning,” he said.
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