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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Nobody really knows how much power the data center boom will need — and that’s putting utilities in a tough spot. If they underinvest in power plants and the grid, economic growth and energy reliability will suffer. But if they overinvest, Americans may pay for infrastructure nobody needs.

One way to blunt these risks, a new report says, is scaling up virtual power plants. These are networks of rooftop solar systems, home batteries, and other distributed energy equipment that utilities can control remotely to free up space on the grid we already have.

As of 2025, the U.S. had 113 gigawatts of distributed energy resources that could be used for VPPs, says the report published Thursday by consultancy The Brattle Group on behalf of The Pew Charitable Trusts. If the country can more than quadruple that capacity to 524 GW by midcentury, it could avoid the need for $614 billion in grid investments. In turn, the report estimates, the average household electricity bill would drop by $122 per year by 2050.

The findings are largely in line with previous analyses of how VPPs can save consumers money. Paying lots of homes and businesses to use less electricity or share their solar and battery power when grid demand peaks can be cheaper than building more power plants and grid infrastructure — although that relies on utility planners being confident enough that VPP capacity will dependably show up to forgo those investments.

But Brattle’s report goes a step further than past analyses, looking at how VPPs could also act as a hedge against uncertain data center demand. The report examines a hypothetical nationwide scenario in which actual load growth falls 5% short of forecasts between now and 2030. In that scenario, overinvestment in power plants and grid infrastructure added about $84 billion in costs borne by U.S. utility customers from 2030 to 2040. By expanding VPPs, the report finds those overbuilding costs were reduced by $33 billion, or roughly 40%.

That’s largely due to the inherent flexibility of VPPs compared to traditional utility investments, said Ryan Hledik, a principal at Brattle and lead author of the report.

“These are smaller modular resources we can bring online, once the necessary systems are in place,” he said. ​“You can wait longer to figure out if that demand is actually going to appear, and then build the VPP at that point.”

These findings are valuable as utilities, regulators, and policymakers struggle to navigate a broad public backlash against data centers while still ensuring that they invest enough today to meet growing power demand.

“I’m not envious of anyone whose job is load growth forecasting. I think they’re facing a level of uncertainty no one has faced before — certainly not in my 20 years of analysis,” Hledik said.

States are pushing utilities to impose special rules and rates to protect customers from being stuck paying for infrastructure built for data centers that never materialize, he said. However, it’s unclear how completely those policies could insulate everyday consumers, particularly in worst-case scenarios.

Implementing and running VPPs also costs money, of course, and participating customers need to be compensated. But Brattle’s analysis finds that the grid benefits they deliver are worth more than what participants are paid. And if it turns out that they’re not needed, those payments can be adjusted downward.

That might not be the best VPP customer-relations strategy, Hledik said. ​“If your incentives are really volatile, the program is going to lose some of its attractiveness.” Still, it’s better than having to pay for an unneeded power plant or substation for decades to come, he said.

The next step is to build these potential VPP benefits into how utilities plan their grids, said Maureen Quinlan, senior manager of energy modernization at The Pew Charitable Trusts. Her group has published a policy playbook and state policy explorer tool that lay out a variety of approaches, including VPP mandates like those passed by Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, and Virginia.

Hledik highlighted how data center developers themselves could push VPPs forward, citing Google’s work with VPP aggregator Voltus to seek out a gigawatt of distributed capacity across the territory of PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest energy market.

“I really hope that a focus of the industry and regulators will be removing barriers to the hyperscaler bring-your-own distributed capacity model,” he said. ​“Certain hyperscalers have the resources to dramatically transform things on the demand side.”

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The offshore wind farm Revolution Wind is completely up and running — despite the Trump administration’s repeated and ongoing efforts to halt development of the $6.2 billion project.

On Thursday, the Danish energy giant Ørsted said its 704-megawatt wind farm near Connecticut and Rhode Island began ​“generating up to its full capacity” in October. Revolution Wind began producing smaller amounts of power in the spring, and the company installed the last of 65 turbines in September.

The project is the third U.S. utility-scale offshore wind farm to reach full commercial operations, after South Fork Wind near New York and Vineyard Wind near Massachusetts.

“Revolution Wind will provide enough electricity to power the equivalent of more than 350,000 New England homes, strengthening the region’s supply of affordable, reliable energy,” Ørsted said in an emailed statement after its quarterly earnings call. The company is selling the carbon-free electricity to three utilities in the area: Rhode Island Energy, Eversource Energy, and United Illuminating.

America’s once-burgeoning offshore wind industry has weathered a series of political attacks since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025. Before his second administration began, BloombergNEF projected that the U.S. would build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035. Now, it expects just 5.9 GW to come online — an amount that reflects the handful of projects that were already completed or under construction at the start of last year.

Despite the diminished pipeline, the carbon-free energy source is still expected to help keep household utility bills in check across the U.S. Northeast, experts say. Revolution Wind and the country’s other completed projects have already played a key role in reducing grid stress during extreme weather events this year.

“Revolution Wind will provide an essential boost of utility-scale electricity to the power-hungry Northeast, delivering a substantial new source of generation, diversifying supply, and strengthening electric reliability for decades,” said Hillary Bright, executive director of offshore wind advocacy group Turn Forward, in a Thursday statement.

Ørsted hit its power milestone despite being forced to halt construction twice last year.

In August 2025, the Interior Department issued a stop-work order for Revolution Wind, due to unspecified national security threats. That order was tossed out by a federal judge one month later. But in late December, the administration issued new stop-work orders to all five offshore wind projects then under construction. Judges struck those orders down one by one — but not before developers had lost huge sums of money and nearly missed key project deadlines.

Revolution Wind still isn’t fully out of Trump’s crosshairs.

In October, the Interior Department asked a federal court for permission to reevaluate the agency’s 2023 approval of the wind farm’s construction and operations plan. While the move didn’t immediately affect the project’s activities, experts said it adds uncertainty around what is now a fully operational installation.

Meanwhile, Ørsted said it’s making progress on another offshore wind development, Sunrise Wind. The developer on Thursday said it has finished installing all of the wind-turbine foundations for the 924-MW project off the coast of Long Island, New York. That installation is expected to be fully operational in the second half of next year.

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