Community concern grows, activist demand accountability for Moss Landing fires
MONTEREY COUNTY, Calif. (KION-TV) -- A group of concerned people speaking out, this after PG&E announced they would be shutting back down their battery storage facility because of technical issues.
Never Again Moss Landing taking it up to the supervisors meeting. Their concerns, demands and voices heard in hopes of a change.
“New green technology is a great new technology when it works, when it doesn't work, it's seriously toxic.” Ed Mitchell - the lead investigator for Never Again Moss Landing has followed the aftermath of the Vistra Energy fire very closely.
“It isn't just the battery, there was a layout of a facility that appears to have closer positioning of batteries inside the building than you never do outside the building,” Mitchell says. “So we believe there's an area there that has to be corrected.”
Monday the Monterey and Santa Cruz counties shared the results of a survey done to address the public concerns. The study found that of 1500 responses, 82 percent showed some sort of health symptom. The majority of them seeing headaches, sore throat and a cough.
“There's unpredictable things that can happen, it's very complicated,” says Supervisor Glenn Church. “I'm glad to hear that pg&e didn't go forth with them. with everything.”
The concern remains after PG&E's storage facility restart was halted due to a leak found during the testing process to re-start the facility. Supervisor Church remains on his stance that both Vistra and PG&E’s facilities should not reopen until a cause has been proven.
Meanwhile, Mitchell concerned about the plan to open a similar power plant in Watsonville. “They're thinking of coming back and building another indoor facility with hundreds of thousands of batteries. The community deserves to have some proof that it's not going to fail again. However, the project lead for New Leaf Energy tells KION: “The project will include outdoor separated containers, each with the very latest on-board fire suppression system and in total contrast with what Vistra had at Moss Landing. Each container will include only 40 (forty) batteries. The aggregate total of all the batteries (multiplying the proposed 150 separated containers by 40 batteries each) proposed for the site is just 6,000 - a much, much smaller number of batteries than 100,000 that were housed indoors at Moss Landing.” Said, Max Christian, project lead for New Leaf Energy
Assemblywoman Dawn Addis is working on bill 303 to give further powers to local governments in the decision making process of future plants. She says, “it would give local control so local permitting authority to cities and counties, and it would also have a reasonable setback from environmentally sensitive areas as well as prime agricultural land neighborhoods, schools, businesses.”
We checked if that bill passes it would do so in late July or August, also it would only apply to new battery plants built after the bill was introduced.
