Vistra’s Moss Landing grid battery is on fire yet again

A grid battery plant in Moss Landing, California, caught fire again on September 18, a year and a half after a much larger fire wrecked the facility in January 2025. The plant, owned by Vistra, was once the world's most powerful grid battery, built inside a former gas turbine building south of Santa Cruz. That building and battery design turned out to be out of step with safety practices used elsewhere in the industry, and it fueled the 2025 blaze.

Since then, Vistra has been tearing the plant down, pulling out battery modules by hand for recycling or disposal. Workers had already removed 34,000 modules and were working through the last 5,000, some of which may still hold a partial charge. County officials say the new fire involves batteries damaged in the earlier 2025 fire, and that it is smaller than that blaze, with hopes it will burn out within 24 hours. A shelter-in-place order is in effect for the surrounding coastal area. A neighboring PG&E battery site was not affected.

For homeowners weighing solar-plus-battery setups or curious about grid storage news like this, the key point is that Moss Landing's problems trace back to an outdated design and battery chemistry that the industry has since moved away from. Newer grid batteries use safer lithium ferrous phosphate chemistry and are built in spaced-out, modular containers meant to contain a fire rather than let it spread, unlike Moss Landing's dense, reused industrial building.