Large-scale batteries are safer than ever, but a few battery fires have spurred public backlash. Clean energy experts are working to win back trust.

Hi everyone! Welcome back to California Wire. Last Thursday, I took the train up to Sacramento to participate in a panel at the California Energy Storage Alliance’s annual conference. The topic was grid-scale lithium-ion batteries, and how to reassure communities that they’re safe neighbors.

California has more grid batteries than any state except Texas — a massive 21 gigawatts of capacity. But as battery installations have surged, so has public opposition, with city governments moving to limit or ban new battery projects.

In the past few years, a handful of high-profile fires in California have fanned fears about battery safety. Most notably, in January 2025, an installation at Moss Landing burst into flames, forcing nearby residents to evacuate — and then, just last month, it ignited again. Also last month, a fire at a much smaller battery system led to evacuations in the city of La Verne.

These incidents spread like, well, wildfire on social media, where misinformation abounds. But California needs to more than double its current battery capacity by 2045 to meet its climate goals, so it’s important that we figure out how to engage with local communities to make sure they know the facts.

On Thursday, I and my fellow panelists talked about some ideas for how to do this. To start with, California Energy Commissioner Noemí Gallardo cited compelling new data from the Electric Power Research Institute showing a 98% decrease in lithium-ion grid battery failures across the world from 2018 to 2025, making them about as reliable as the big oil-filled transformers at grid substations.

Of course, facts like these falter in the face of scary images of disasters like the Moss Landing fires, Gallardo said. But today’s utility-scale battery installations are built to a much higher safety standard, specifically to prevent Moss Landing–type conflagrations, as my colleague Julian Spector has reported. ​“Even though there is a minority of people saying batteries are not safe, this data shows they are,” Gallardo said.

California last year also beefed up its battery fire-safety regulations and practices. That’s not just sound policy, it’s also smart community engagement, said Ashanti Washington, media relations director for the Reliable Grid Project. Her organization held focus-group sessions with Data for Progress in three California communities to ask who residents trust on battery safety. ​“First responders rose to the top,” she said.

Bringing state agencies like the CEC into the permitting process can help ensure that the latest fire-safety practices are being put to use. Take the 400-megawatt Potentia-Viridi project in rural Alameda County, which won CEC approval earlier this year under its new Opt-In Certification program for energy projects seeking expedited state review.

While some locals are leery of this kind of state intervention — in at least one instance when a developer tried to use the CEC process, it backfired — the safety expertise state agencies bring to bear can make a positive difference.

Julia Poska, communications manager for Clearway Energy Group, developer of the Potentia-Viridi project, said Alameda County officials were glad to work with the CEC, which ​“has a lot of technical understanding” through its participation in a state interagency battery-safety group. ​“They’re able to ask tough questions about safety,” and work with local fire agencies to ensure they’re prepared for emergencies.

It helped that Potentia-Viridi is in a remote part of the county, Poska added. Batteries in populated areas are a tougher sell. Earlier this year, neighbors of a proposed 320-megawatt project in San Diego County protested so much, the developer abandoned its efforts. Still, other projects have been able to win local support in even more densely populated areas.

Talking up the clean energy benefits that batteries deliver can also help convince neighbors to get on board, said Miranda Ehrlich, senior campaign director at Greenlight America, a nonprofit that supports community organizing on behalf of clean energy. ​“We’ve seen projects succeed as a result,” she said.

In Chino, the city council flipped last month from opposing a 400-MW battery project not far from a city park to approving it, after the developer made a host of safety commitments. Labor unions and clean energy supporters also voiced support, and Chino Valley Fire Chief Dave William affirmed that his department has been ​“very well-trained” to respond to battery emergencies.

My take

Local opposition to clean energy projects is a major problem. But we can’t write off opponents as just NIMBYs or peddlers of social-media disinformation. People have legitimate public-safety and environmental concerns about batteries, even if new projects are very unlikely to burst into flames. And communities near polluting fossil-fuel facilities are justified in worrying that a nearby battery project might impose more environmental injustices.

I shared a few of my own ideas during the panel: helping media outlets access relevant data under tight deadlines after there is some kind of accident, and bringing more transparency into how safe modern battery facilities really are. Hey, why not station webcams that stream 24/7 footage of batteries just sitting there, not bursting into flame?

What else I’m watching

In other lithium news, this week Inside Climate News published an ambitious article on the race to extract that mineral from the environmentally degraded Salton Sea, an inland lake that overlays one of the world’s largest lithium deposits trapped in hot underground brine.

Under the state’s Lithium Valley Vision plan, billions of dollars are being invested in facilities to mine and process the lithium and also capture the region’s geothermal power potential. But Inside Climate News and Columbia Journalism Investigations remind us that the region’s deep-pocketed water-rights holders stand to benefit the most from that development, even as local residents who suffer high rates of poverty struggle to pay for clean drinking water.

By the numbers

This chart, from the EPRI battery safety report mentioned above, has some scale problems: The bars representing how many battery failures happen per year are way bigger than the rising blue curve showing how fast battery deployments are growing. So pay attention to the orange line showing ​“failure incidents per deployed GWh.” That’s the line that tells the important story, which is that far fewer batteries are failing even as grid battery deployments are experiencing hockey-stick growth.

Happenings

Don’t forget, tonight starting at 6:00 p.m., I’ll be hanging out with Canary Media Managing Editor Wendy Becktold at Drake’s Dealership in downtown Oakland. (Drake’s is a great brewpub with outdoor seating, not a used-car lot, in case you were wondering.) It’ll be a super-casual affair, with great food, great drinks, and great conversation. Come on by!

You can also catch me, along with many climate and energy luminaries, at our Canary Live Bay Area event on Nov. 10 in Berkeley. Hope to see you there!

And a quick programming note: Starting next week, this newsletter will be published on Thursdays instead of Wednesdays, all in the interest of bringing you the freshest news!

Photo of the week

No water is too cold for Lily the corgi — as long as there’s a stick to swim out to fetch. She particularly loves swimming at Point Isabel, which brings together glorious views of the San Francisco Bay with some of the happiest dogs on earth. (She’s less enthusiastic about the other regular feature of our visits to Point Isabel — getting her nails clipped at Mudpuppy’s — but they do a great job of it.)

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As the conflict roils gasoline and diesel markets, the U.S. has seen a higher per-person cost increase than any other country, a new analysis finds.

Donald Trump ran for his second term promising to ​“make America affordable again.” Two years later, the president’s war with Iran has his constituents paying through the nose for gasoline and diesel.

In fact, per-person fuel costs have risen more in the U.S. than in any other country since the start of the conflict, according to a new analysis from the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, or CREA.

The group calculates that between March 1 — the day after the U.S. and Israel made their initial strikes on Iran — and Oct. 14, gasoline and diesel costs in the U.S. were $160 billion higher than they would have been otherwise. That comes out to an extra $471 per person. CREA used fuel prices from January and February as a baseline to calculate the increases.

Why are Americans paying so much more? It’s not because fuel prices have jumped more here; our price increases are similar to those in other market economies, CREA says. It’s because we guzzle a huge amount of gas in our personal vehicles.

“U.S. consumers … use so much oil, leaving them exposed to price shocks they can’t control,” CREA co-founder Lauri Myllyvirta said in a press release. ​“The lesson is clear: The best protection against volatile oil prices isn’t pumping more oil, it’s needing less of it.”

That’s where — you guessed it — electric vehicles come into play. Going electric allows drivers to avoid swinging prices at the pump by simply zooming past the gas station altogether. Although electricity bills are also on the rise in much of the U.S., power prices tend to be more stable than gasoline prices. Case in point: The cost of driving a typical gas car 100 miles in the U.S. jumped from $11.23 to $16.69 over the first five months of this year, while the cost of driving an EV the same distance remained around $5.80, according to The New York Times.

Unfortunately for aspiring EV owners, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have made it harder to afford the vehicles. Last year, they ripped away federal tax credits that cut the cost of an electric car by thousands of dollars.

That move might not be weighing on the minds of voters as midterm elections loom. But sky-high gasoline prices certainly are — and that could help tip the scales in the direction of Democrats as they look to retake Congress.

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The nation’s biggest grid operator is about to start working on a fix that would make it much easier to add batteries to existing power plants and solar and wind farms.

PJM Interconnection is finally taking steps that could let a lot of new battery capacity connect to its grid without eons of delay.

PJM is the biggest grid operator in the U.S., serving customers across 13 mid-Atlantic, Midwestern, and Southern states. Its grid is notoriously bogged down and congested, especially now that data centers are clamoring for more power, and that’s leading to high electricity prices in its territory.

Among other shortcomings, it’s been falling behind its counterparts elsewhere in the country in pursuing a straightforward solution: allowing power plants to add batteries on-site in order to get more out of grid connections that aren’t always used to full capacity.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has directed grid operators to pave the way for these kinds of battery additions under Surplus Interconnection Service (SIS) rules. The idea is to let existing power plants — mainly solar and wind farms — add batteries that can soak up excess power when it’s not needed, and then inject it through existing grid connections when power plants aren’t generating at their full potential.

That could be particularly valuable when region-wide demand for electricity spikes, usually on hot summer afternoons or cold winter mornings. PJM has seen the cost of capacity resources to keep the grid running during these times skyrocket over the past few years, largely due to pressures to supply power to proposed data centers.

But PJM has been a laggard in reforming its SIS procedures, according to grid experts and clean energy groups that have been pushing for changes for years. That’s been the case even as grid operators in other regions have crafted regulations and processes that have opened the door to tens of gigawatts of SIS capacity.

Now — better late than never — PJM has agreed to kick off a stakeholder process to reform its market rules to clear the way for SIS battery additions. Its Market Implementation Committee is set to consider the next steps at its Nov. 4 meeting, according to Jon Gordon, a senior director at clean-energy trade group Advanced Energy United. If a plan wins approval, PJM could complete work on the changes and seek FERC’s permission as early as April 2027 to enact them.

How surplus interconnection could bring batteries online fast

Taking advantage of SIS opens up huge opportunities. ​“It’s clearly catching on” in other parts of the country, said Gavin Ahern, co-founder of Surplus Interconnection, which consults with power plant owners on adding capacity through these approaches. His company has tracked 44 gigawatts of historical SIS project requests as of mid-2026, about 80% of them in the form of proposals to add batteries to existing projects.

Some notable projects that have been proposed or approved include the addition of batteries to North Dakota wind farms by NextEra Energy and Great River Energy and to gas power plants in California, and the addition of solar power to gas plants in Illinois.

For clean energy developers looking to boost the value of their projects and supply capacity to meet booming data center demand, SIS is a no-brainer, Ahern said. ​“Renewable energy developers have been among the quickest to see the potential,” he said. ​“They’re looking to get more out of sites they’ve already paid to connect.”

The lion’s share of this activity is in the territories of two Midwestern grid operators: Midcontinent Independent System Operator, with 14.8 GW proposed across 138 active requests, and Southwest Power Pool, with 14.3 GW proposed across 89 active requests. Another 6 GW across 51 active requests are pending across the U.S. West.

In PJM, the numbers are markedly lower. According to its most recent data, the grid operator has received 37 SIS requests since mid-2023, and 18 of them — adding up to about 2.3 gigawatts — have been OK’d for further study that could lead to them being approved for grid interconnection in the coming months.

SIS offers enormous potential for PJM, according to data from Umed Paliwal, a principal scientific engineering associate in the Electricity Markets and Policy Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research indicates that PJM could add 24 GW of energy storage through surplus interconnection at existing power plant sites.

(Paliwal also estimates that PJM could add 102 GW of solar and 28 GW of wind through SIS by building solar and wind farms that share the grid connections of gas peaker plants, which generally fire up only when demand peaks, leaving a lot of capacity for renewable energy to flow during the majority of the year.)

Using SIS to get projects going could help developers save more than $31 billion in interconnection costs and grid upgrades, according to Paliwal. What’s more, since they’re riding on existing grid connections, SIS projects can add their capacity within one to two years — far faster than new power plants and battery installations, which face yearslong wait times in PJM’s backlogged interconnection queues.

This chart from decarbonization think tank RMI shows how much more quickly SIS can bring new resources online than PJM’s standard interconnection process.

“We have members who are really rip-roaring to go on this,” said Gordon of Advanced Energy United. ​“What I’ve learned is that the devil’s really in some of the wonky details that have become obstacles to solving this problem.”

What’s the holdup?

So what has been holding SIS back in PJM? The answer can be broken into two parts: First, PJM needed to fix its approach to studying SIS projects’ impacts on its grid. Now, it still needs to fix its approach to how those projects operate in its energy and capacity markets.

Clean energy groups got to work on the first part of the challenge back in 2024, asking FERC to force PJM to restructure how it studied the grid impacts of adding new resources to an existing generation or battery project. They cited a number of technical barriers that PJM imposed but other grid operators didn’t.

In advance of FERC reviewing these complaints, PJM proposed a series of fixes. That proposal secured support from clean energy groups, and FERC gave PJM permission to institute the changes in early 2025.

But that alone hasn’t opened up the market, Gordon said. He was not aware of any SIS projects that have begun generating power in PJM since those technical changes were made. That’s because the grid operator still doesn’t differentiate between old resources and new resources at the same point of interconnection.

To understand this barrier, keep in mind that owners of power plants, wind and solar farms, and batteries sign power purchase agreements with utilities, corporations, municipalities, and other offtakers that commit the generators to deliver the energy and capacity from those projects for years into the future. Adding a new resource at the same grid interconnection point will require some modification to those contracts.

That’s especially true if the owner of a project wants to sell the capacity value from the newly added resource — say, a battery that’s storing power to deliver at times when the solar or wind farm isn’t generating power — to a different customer altogether.

In parts of the country where SIS projects are moving forward, grid operators have structured straightforward rules around such contracts, said Connor Valaik, a senior transactions manager at LevelTen Energy, a company that manages markets for these kinds of deals.

He offered the example of Southwest Power Pool, which ​“makes it easier to add batteries to existing resources,” even in ​“places where you have an existing PPA, even with a different offtaker. You can add surplus storage, and sell the capacity rights from that.”

But PJM’s existing market rules mean this is almost impossible. In essence, PJM insists that a ​“hybrid resource” — a power project that combines more than one type of technology — be treated as a single ​“market unit” in both its energy markets and its capacity markets.

This might not be a problem if project owners are working with a single customer for both their existing and their new resources, Ahern said. But it’s a near-insurmountable barrier to arranging workable deals between existing and new customers who might want different values out of the old and new resources being combined, said Katie Siegner, a manager on RMI’s Clean Competitive Grids team.

For example, PJM rules would bar a solar farm from continuing to comply with a contract to deliver power to an existing offtaker while also adding batteries that could provide valuable capacity to a data center looking to offset its impact on PJM’s grid. ​“The solar and battery might have different offtakers, different obligations,” she said.

To fix this problem, PJM has proposed a set of changes that, in essence, will allow hybrid projects to separate the contributions of their different resources in both PJM’s energy market and capacity market. ​“You might think of it as an itemized receipt,” Siegner said. ​“It makes it easier to split the bill.”

That simple fix could unlock an enormous amount of pent-up demand for batteries to help meet PJM’s growing hunger for capacity. The new energy storage capacity could be added to existing projects or be integrated into plans for tens of gigawatts of clean power projects that have won permission to connect to PJM’s grid, she said.

This new pathway for bringing batteries more quickly online would be especially welcome in PJM states with energy storage targets, including Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey, Siegner said. Laws passed in Indiana and Virginia that require major utilities to identify and analyze the potential for surplus interconnection could also help boost deployment.

These market rule changes could still be a long way off. Even if PJM moves proposed reforms through swiftly, FERC’s approval of them might take until late next year.

That slow pace is ​“frustrating,” Advanced Energy United’s Gordon said. ​“We’re not talking about physical limitations to the grid. We’re just talking about this quagmire of administrative processes and legal rights.”

If the barriers to surplus interconnection service can be lifted, that could spur a lot of investment in batteries, relatively cheaply and speedily, he said. ​“Given PJM’s desperate situation for capacity, anything that would help PJM manage peaks better — like getting batteries online — would make a massive difference.”

In particular, data center developers might want to bankroll batteries. Data centers are under increasing pressure from state and federal regulators to build their own capacity resources to avoid pushing more costs onto everyday customers — and PJM’s attempts to solve that problem have been stalled.

Earlier this month, FERC rejected PJM’s painstakingly developed plan to require data centers and other ​“large loads” to supply their own capacity or face having their power cut off during grid emergencies.

Given that setback, data center developers and other PJM stakeholders that are trying to curb rising electricity prices are eager for options that can serve their needs as quickly as possible, Siegner said — and surplus interconnection is one of the best ones out there.

“I would like to think that if you threw a battery onto an existing solar project, given how capacity-constrained PJM is today, you could find someone as an offtaker,” she said.

A correction was made on Oct. 30, 2026: Between the time this article was written and the time it was published, PJM released new data on its approvals of SIS projects. The article originally stated that PJM had received 14 SIS requests and approved two of them. According to the latest data, it has received 37 SIS requests and approved 18 for further study.

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