Bravo Conway for standing up to BESS
“If you can’t easily extinguish one battery, how are you expected to extinguish tens of thousands? You can’t. You have to let the batteries burn themselves out.” This was a comment at a board meeting in Monterey, California.
Kudos to the the Conway people and town officials for fighting against the proposed battery energy storage system (BESS), to preserve the health of your people and rural area!
Battery energy storage systems are still dangerous, contrary to those who claim they are not! (Major incident from 2025 below). While rooftop solar arrays are great, industrial solar is disastrous!
I read with interest Recorder reporter Aalianna Marietta’s article, “Proposed battery energy storage system (BESS) in Conway stirs safety concerns.” In this well-written article, there was great emphasis on all kinds of “mitigation” for various things that have led to numerous disasters — and little emphasis on the damage to precious human life and nature.
Mitigation means there are dangers — in this case urgent dangers. Lithium battery fires result in “thermal runaway” fires that cannot be put out. Toxic plumes have spread into surrounding counties, causing nosebleeds, headaches and breathing problems and endangering wildlife.
Monolithic utility companies would not spend money on “mitigation” if the technology was as safe as they claim! The nice man from BlueWave cares so much about our well-being that putting thousands of industrial sized highly toxic lithium batteries and a massive solar installation on perfectly good farmland is more important than human life, nature and and the peaceful, pastoral character of the landscape that is being destroyed. Wandering about underneath solar arrays or near huge banks of lithium ion batteries is not a healthy environment for cattle, the farmers or wildlife.
Lithium ion batteries emit extremely toxic, highly flammable gasses. These gasses can ignite as they are released, exploding and causing wildfires. Lithium battery fires commonly keep reigniting — even the smallest ones put flammable toxins in the air.
Lithium battery fires typically result in thermal runaway — spreading much faster than ordinary fires, and generating up to 6000 degree heat (twice the 2500 – 3000 degrees typical of huge wildfires).
There are already 93 known fire emergencies of BESS installations. I suppose such nice, solicitous speech about “mitigation” was used to get those BESS disasters in place as well.
The quotes below about the huge fire at the Moss Landing Lithium Power Plant are from the reporting of Sarah Aminoff of Safe Tech International:
“80 Percent of 100,000 Batteries Ignited – Not a “Little Fire.”
“When lithium batteries burned for a week, smoldered for a month, and then reignited, many began questioning why the world’s largest lithium battery power plant was approved near Elkhorn Slough State Marine Conservation area, an area with the highest marine biodiversity in California (see San Jose State blog) and home of 150 endangered sea otters. What will be the impacts of this contamination given these sea otters, when healthy, birth a single pup every other year?”
“Dubbed by Forbes magazine Tech’s “Three-Mile Island” moment, Moss Landing Lithium Power Plant caught on fire Jan. 16, 2025. Moss Landing, which houses the world’s largest battery storage facility, burned for five days leaving a toxic plume that reached into agricultural and farmland in Monterey and into two other counties.”
Destroying nature and harming people is not green! The “mitigation” so touted by the company is akin to “mitigation” of radiation at nuclear plants — and we all know how well that has worked!
Renowned environmentalist Erin Brockovich is supporting the community filing a lawsuit due to health impacts weeks after the Moss Landing BESS fire.
Heads up Pioneer Valley towns, and bravo to the Conway people!
Ellen Landauer lives in Charlemont.