A Vistra battery plant that caught fire in 2025 is now on fire again during teardown
A new fire broke out at Vistra's Moss Landing battery site in California on Friday, more than a year after a catastrophic blaze forced the plant's shutdown and ongoing dismantling.
According to a piece published Friday by Julian Spector on Canary Media, a fire broke out at Vistra's Moss Landing battery storage facility in California as crews were in the middle of decommissioning the site. The facility once held 300 megawatts and 1,200 megawatt-hours of capacity and came online in 2020 as the world's most powerful grid battery, but has been offline and under teardown since a much larger fire in January 2025 forced its shutdown.
Workers had already removed roughly 34,000 of the plant's battery modules before Friday's fire, with about 5,000 still left to extract. Authorities said the new fire involved previously damaged batteries and was not comparable in scale to the January 2025 blaze, though it underscores the lingering risk of handling large volumes of damaged lithium-ion equipment during a slow, multi-year teardown.
A local witness told Canary Media that smaller smoldering incidents at the site had become almost routine even before the major fire, which "pretty much shut everything down." The recurring incidents at Moss Landing have become a reference point in debates over battery storage safety standards as utilities and developers race to build out grid-scale storage nationwide.
Julian Spector, Canary Media: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/vistra-moss-landing-on-fire-again
This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by an editor before publication.
