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When Longroad Energy proposed the Allium Solar andEnergy Storage System Project last August, the plans for a 945-acre installation north of the Hollister Municipal Airport raised painful memories for many in the community of the massive January 2025 fire at the Vistra energy storage facility at the Moss Landing Power Plant.
The 300-megawatt Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) was destroyed when an uncontrollable, self-sustaining chain reaction started a fire, which released smoke and pollutants into Monterey, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara and San Benito Counties.
In a direct response to Longroad’s proposal, the San Benito County Board of Supervisors, at its March 10 meeting, voted to impose a 45-day moratorium on any new large-scale energy storage projects.
Now the county is weighing the changes in technology, fire codes and state regulations developed since the Moss Landing incident as it determines a regulatory framework for such projects.
Allium Project
According to the Conditional Use Permit (CUP) application submitted to the county by Longroad Energy on Aug. 1, 2025, the Allium Solar and Energy Storage System Project is designed to generate 110 megawatts (MW) of solar power and includes a 15-acre BESS capable of storing 440 megawatt-hours, approximately eight hours of power discharging at 110 MW.
The U.S. Energy Information Agency estimates that the average home uses 10,500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per year, so the plant would generate enough power for at least 60,000 households.
The project would be located north of the airport, described in the CUP as “adjacent to Frazier Lake Road to the north, State Route 156 (San Felipe Road) to the southeast, the Hollister Municipal Airport to the south, and State Route 25 (Bolsa Road) to the west.
The land is zoned as Agricultural Productive, but the CUP states that the current owner considers it to be “low-productivity farmland used mostly for grazing, with a smaller portion of the site used for growing crops.”
According to the submission, the area is also overgrown with “broomrape,” an invasive, parasitic weed which, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, is a “clear and present danger” to California’s agricultural industry because of its impact on crop yields.
Power would be connected to the grid via a transmission line to the PG&E Crazy Horse Canyon Switching Station Project, located near Salinas. The new switchyard at the Allium project would be constructed by Longroad and deeded to PG&E.
The power generated by the project has already been deeded to Marin Clean Energy in an agreement signed in February 2025.
According to Longroad Development Manager Laren Cyphers, in an interview with BenitoLink, Marin Clean Energy is technically purchasing clean energy credits, which is a financial arrangement rather than a physical diversion of the electricity.
“It’s a little counterintuitive,” Cyphers said, “but the electrical grid is like a big lake. It flows like water to the path of least resistance to reach demand. The power generated by Allium naturally supports the nearest demand first: San Benito County.”
The project has a 40-year lifespan, based on the life of the solar panels, after which it will be dismantled and the land restored. However, Cyphers said that if the project is successful, the firm may seek approval of a new CUP for an additional number of years.
Longroad has built more than a dozen solar facilities in various states, but has completed only one other project with a BESS facility: the Sun Streams 4 project in Arizona’s Maricopa County.
Cause of Moss Landing fire
In 2018, Vistra Energy converted existing buildings at Moss Landing, previously used for steam generation, into an indoor BESS facility. According to the Moss Landing BESS Final Fire Report, compiled by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, the fire started in ML300, the first of the three completed phases of the project.
More than 4,500 stacked racks, each containing 22 nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries, were housed in what had been a brick housing a wind turbine. According to the report, on Jan. 16, 2025, two groups of BESS units in ML 300 were undergoing a routine capacity test at 11 a.m. This involved charging the units to their maximum capacity to assess cell degradation.
At 2:48 p.m., a fire alarm indicated a possible thermal runaway event.
“Thermal runaway” is defined in the report as “a dangerous and uncontrolled process in which a battery cell rapidly overheats.” This begins when the heat generated inside the cell surpasses the rate at which it can be dissipated into the surrounding environment.
As the temperature rose, the cells released flammable and toxic gases. They ignited, triggering a chain reaction that spread to neighboring cells. Within 20 minutes, the fire department was on site, activating exhaust fans to clear the smoke from the building.
The fire burned for two days, with heat and smoke rising for a week.
The site was declared a total loss. Vistra entered into an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency to pay for the “safe removal, treatment, transport, and recycling or disposal” of the damaged batteries. Vistra publishes information on the progress of this effort on its website.
Indoor storage exacerbated fire
Moss Landing, as detailed in the report, was one of the earliest large-scale BESS installations in the country. The 300 Megawatt system was planned in 2018, a year before the 2019 release of the first fire safety standard for energy storage systems, National Fire Protection Association Code (NFPA) 855.
Since the project was approved prior to the new standard, it was “grandfathered in” and allowed to proceed under less stringent standards that did not adequately account, as NFPA 855 does, for battery volatility or storage methods.
Retired Kern County Fire Chief Mike Nicholas, who has been working on BESS development standards in California at the local and state levels, consulted on the Moss Landing fire as an expert.
He said that one of the critical problems was the way the batteries were warehoused with inadequate separation inside buildings. The confines of the retrofitted turbine building made the fire easier to spread and harder to fight.
As a result, Nicholas said, 80% of the batteries, or 240 out of the 300 megawatts, were involved in the fire.
“What we see,” he said, “is a lot of the big lessons learned. When you deploy batteries in buildings, and they’re not in containers, you have big open areas for fires. We’ve seen a huge pivot in the industry away from indoor deployment.”
The aftereffects of the Moss Landing fire are still being debated.
Investigations of the fire conducted by the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, the EPA and Monterey County concluded that “air, water, and soil testing by multiple agencies have found no threats to public health or agriculture to date.”
Vistra has posted the results of these tests on its Environmental Testing and Health page.
However, a study published in December 2025, co-authored by Ivano W. Aiello, a professor of marine geology at San José State, disputes these findings. Aiello said the studies missed heavy-metal fallout on the ground.
“My colleagues and I were able to show through before-and-after samples from the marshes what was in the battery fire’s debris and what happened to the heavy metals,” he wrote. “The batteries’ metal fragments didn’t disappear. They continue to be remobilized in the environment today.”
Controlled burns, isolated batteries
Another lesson learned, Nicholas said, came from discovering that the overhead sprinkler system at Moss Landing had proven so ineffective that it was deactivated while the fire was still raging.
NFPA 855 also recommends a shift away from water-based sprinkler systems, noting they are often ineffective and can lead to reignition. The recommended protocols emphasize explosion prevention, controlled burnouts and isolation/containment.
“It is a switch in our approach as firefighters,” Nicholas said. “We want to go in, put the wet stuff on the red stuff, and get the fire out. Now, we’re setting up a defensive operation to find out what’s going on, not so much in the enclosure of origin, but what’s going on outside of it.”
According to the report, the majority of BESS facilities have moved from the more volatile nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries used at Moss Landing to lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, which are more cost-effective, potentially less polluting, and less prone to thermal runaway.
Nicholas also said the industry has moved on from the racks of batteries in indoor storage that failed at Moss Landing to spaced-out and isolated outdoor containers, such as those proposed for the Allium project.
This protective spacing between units is critical to the current standard for testing battery energy storage systems, Underwriters Laboratories (UL) 9540, which was not in place at the time of the Moss Landing fire. The protocol requires proof that “complete combustion of one enclosure/unit will not propagate thermal runaway to adjacent units.”
Testing begins with individual battery cells, which Nicholas said is focused on the battery’s basic chemical behavior, with no other substances introduced beyond the single cell.
A test on the modular level includes the materials used to house the cells, which Nicholas said is considered a critical stage for determining toxic profiles.
“With the individual cells you do not see a lot of the toxins that people are so concerned about,” he said. “It’s when we introduce the plastics that we actually run into problems. These plastics contribute to the chemical emissions during a failure scenario.”
The unit-level test is a requirement of NFPA 855, Nicholas said, and is designed to simulate a worst-case failure of an entire enclosure, as would happen in a thermal runaway situation.
“The test is predicated on demonstrating that a fire in a single enclosure won’t propagate beyond the enclosure of origin and affect adjacent enclosures,” he said.
An enclosure full of batteries is connected to thermocouple sensors, infrared cameras and other monitoring devices, Nicholas said. It’s then forced into a thermal runaway scenario through conventional means or into a full fire scenario using ceramic heaters, jet flames or “whatever it takes to light these whole enclosures on fire.”
The goal is to establish that thermal runaway can be confined to a single enclosure, rather than spreading throughout the entire installation.
“By design,” he said, “and by outdoor containerized deployment, we’ve taken down the risk of batteries involved in the fire to 0.5% of what was lost at Moss Landing. It is incomparable to what we saw there.”
Because battery failure would be less likely to cause a large-scale fire, Nicholas said the potential for widespread fire-related pollution would also be limited.
“Most toxins in a battery fire like this,” he said, “come from the plastics and polymers used in the modules and housing. A lot of the volatile compounds don’t spread more than 10 to 15 feet away when it’s burning in that state.”
Other new regulations
In addition to the regulations and specifications introduced by the National Fire Protection Association and Underwriters Laboratories, the State of California has recently passed two laws in direct response to the Moss Landing fire.
State Senator John Laird authored SB 283, the “Clean Energy Safety Act of 2025,” which passed in October 2025. The bill would require the California Building Standards Commission and the Office of the State Fire Marshal to review NFPA 855 and include it in the next update of the California Building Standards Code in July 2026.
Any new BESS projects would have to certify that the facility “has been designed in accordance with the most recently published edition of the NFPA 855” along with any project application and, following construction, be further certified as compliant by local fire officials.
It also mandates that any new facility be either located outdoors or in a noncombustible, dedicated-use building.
A second law, AB 1285, sponsored by the House Emergency Management Committee, requires the state fire marshal to consult with the Office of Emergency Services to “develop fire prevention, response, and recovery measures for utility-grade lithium-ion battery storage facilities.”
Local ordinances
Outside the complex regulatory web of state laws and industry standards, many cities and counties are creating similar local ordinances to what San Benito is now considering.
At the March 10 meeting, County Director of Planning, Building & Code Enforcement Abraham Prado framed it as a reasonable response to the public’s concern over the Moss Landing fire.
“While BESS facilities may play a role in advancing statewide energy objectives,” he said, “recent incidents have heightened public concern regarding the safety of these facilities and their potential effect on public health and the communities in which they are located.”
Among the concerns he cited were emergency response preparedness and potential environmental contamination, saying a moratorium on the BESS project would give the county sufficient time to develop specific development standards.
“Staff requires time to conduct research,” Prado said, “to consult subject matter experts, coordinate with the fire department and the environmental health department, research existing standards adopted by other jurisdictions, and draft an appropriate ordinance.”
Nicholas points to the current efforts by San Diego, Los Angeles and Orange Counties, noting that the ordinances he has seen are more restrictive than existing codes.
One of the difficulties, he said, is that much of what a county might want to consider, such as a full hazard mitigation analysis, is unknown to the contractors until the technology has been selected and then procured.
“From the time they get land use approval to the time they go to construction,” he said, “it is not a very advantageous time to have really concrete answers about the technology they’re going to be using and all of the associated reports that go with it.”
What local control offers, however, is a chance to negotiate an agreement that will benefit the community, rather than the developers invoking AB 205, a law that allows projects to be submitted to the state instead, thereby overriding local control.
Describing AB 205 as one of the bigger issues, Raymond Martinez, author of The San Benito Blueprint, said that it is to the county’s advantage to work with developers rather than be bypassed and lose their seat at the negotiating table.
“Specifically,” he said, “when it comes to community benefits packages, is there potential for a fire station to be included? Or improvements to Hwy 156? Can we offset impacts at the airport? We need to be thinking about these things because right now we hold the negotiating power.”
Cyphers, who has been attending local events such as the farmers market to promote the project, said that, while AB 205 is an option, she understands the desire for local control in the aftermath of the Moss Landing fire.
“So many residents experienced the impacts firsthand,” she said. “We take their concerns about this project’s safety seriously. That’s why we’ve been engaging with the community for years and why we are very supportive of the county establishing its own local standards.”
Note: Raymond Martinez provided a copy of the Conditional Use Permit referenced in this article. He has written two in-depth pieces analyzing the Allium project: 45 Acre Solar + Battery Storage Project Proposed North of Hollister and Deeper Look: The Allium Solar Project.
Related BenitoLink articles
Moss Landing Fire alert from San Benito County
PUBLIC LETTER: The Moss Landing fire – Where do we go from here?
No confirmed cases of illness in SBC following the Moss Landing Fire
BenitoLink: Supervisors hit pause on energy storage projects
Other links
County of Monterey: Current Vistra Fire emergency updates
NFPA 855 Standard for the Installation of Stationary Energy Storage Systems
Underwriters Laboratories (UL) 9540
Vistra: Environmental Testing and Health
Vistra: Clean-up/Recovery Progress
Western Electricity Coordinating Council: Moss Landing BESS Final Fire Report
YouTube: March 10 County Board of Supervisors meeting
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