By Tom Modugno
The tragedy of the Los Angeles fires has been eye opening for a lot of people, especially those that are new to California. But it highlighted the fact that the more people that the state mandate packs into small areas, the more these types of disasters can happen. Especially when the roads are not improved to handle the growing volume of traffic.
Since the Los Angeles fires, the City of Goleta has announced the hiring of an Emergency Services Coordinator and they released an educational video featuring the fire chief, explaining fire risks and preparedness. This of course is all great, but what good does an evacuation plan do when all the roads to safety are all gridlocked?
A climate science professor from UCSB recently published a piece detailing exactly how ill-prepared our infrastructure is for a large scale evacuation. All this is good to discuss and our officials need to be transparent with the public about the potential dangers. So I write this to bring up another danger in our midst that is relatively unknown and rarely mentioned.
About a week after those catastrophic fires in Los Angeles started, a disaster of a different variety erupted in Northern California. One of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery storage plants burst into flames. Since “Let it burn” is the industry-accepted strategy for coping with lithium battery fires, the toxic fire burned for almost a week, shutting down Highway One for three days and forcing the evacuation of 1,200 residents and businesses in an 8 mile radius around the storage plant. The toxic smoke from the fire forced other residents beyond the evacuation area to keep their windows closed and shelter inside. In the aftermath, folks that live near the fire and in communities around the evacuation zone complained about respiratory issues, a metallic taste in their mouth, and other unusual symptoms.

A local official said that “this technology is ahead of the government’s ability to regulate it and the industry’s ability to control it.” That astonishing fact has the Moss Landing citizens very concerned about what the long term impacts of this fire and the effect the toxic smoke it sent into the atmosphere will have. Now that the fire has burned itself out, scientists have found dramatic increases of heavy metals in the soil within a two-mile radius. Nickel, cobalt and manganese, which were in the lithium-ion batteries that burned at the Vistra Energy battery storage plant are now in the Elkhorn Slough between 100 to 1,000 times higher than normal.
Why should this be a big warning for the residents of Goleta? Because whether you know it or not, we have a lithium-ion battery storage plant right smack dab in the middle of one of our busiest residential and commercial areas. Nestled between the Storke Road overpass, the M-Special Brewery and the brand new Cortona Point housing complex sits our own little battery energy storage system (BESS).

While not nearly as big as the Moss Landing plant, it is still a lot of batteries on 2.5 acres. There are 44 Tesla Megapacks, potentially 60 megawatts of electricity (60 million watts), making it the largest power resource in Santa Barbara County. Yet very few people know it exists, and other than the day of the ribbon cutting, the city rarely acknowledges its existence, much less make public any emergency procedures if there was a lithium-ion battery fire. I personally don’t recall hearing any debate about building this battery storage plant, it was just done. Later I learned it was installed to replace an existing plant at Ellwood that did the same job, but was gas powered. So, they traded a fossil fuel technology for a brand new technology that may or may not be safe. Our neighbors up in Morro Bay are now fighting to stop their city from installing a BESS, but I don’t think the citizens of Goleta were ever given that opportunity.
The Moss Landing plant was much bigger than ours, and the evacuation area was an eight mile radius, so how big would the evacuation area be for our little 60 megawatt plant? Since we have no idea if there is any emergency protocol in place, let’s assume it is only a one mile radius evacuation. Now think about how many homes that would include. Besides the two new neighborhoods that are on either side of it, a one mile evacuation radius would encompass part of the airport, part of Isla Vista, out to Costco, and to the north it would include Dos Pueblos High School and the surrounding neighborhoods, up to the Glen Annie Golf Course. If our county supervisors successfully build over 1,000 new homes at Glen Annie, we can add that to the evacuation area. Now imagine that evacuation process with a toxic cloud overhead. And really, would you feel safe if you were just a mile away from a toxic cloud?

According to research from Newcastle University, there have been 40 known fires at large-scale lithium-ion battery energy storage systems in recent years. A fire broke out at a storage facility located in San Diego County in September of 2023. Homes and businesses near that facility were evacuated and a four hour shelter-in-place order was put into effect. In 2019, the McMicken Battery Energy Storage System in Arizona exploded, injuring several firefighters. In New York, the governor launched a special taskforce to investigate the safety of battery energy storage facilities after three fires in 2023 left residents warned to shelter indoors.
The Tesla Megapacks like we have in our Goleta plant are supposed to be much safer than what they had at Moss Landing, but there have already been fires involving them as well. In 2023, a Tesla Megapack caught fire in the Bouldercombe Battery Project in Australia. While the company that built the project said the fire was minor, police had urged nearby residents to “stay indoors and keep respiratory medication close by” and officials said hazardous smoke spread across the area. There are more incidents, google it.
Surely, the battery technology is getting safer every day, but shouldn’t the city of Goleta at least be transparent about this possibility? Haven’t we learned preparation is key to averting disaster, even if the odds are low. A great example is the fact that the County of Santa Barbara recognizes March 27 through March 31 as Tsunami Preparedness Week, and we have signs warning us about tsunamis at every beach. But we have had only one tsunami in Santa Barbara County in recorded history, way back in 1812!
This is not written to create a panic, but to at least open a conversation and inform the public. Every local person I have mentioned this battery storage plant to did not know it existed. I hope and pray our local firefighters know it exists and they have a plan ready to deal with the possibility of a lithium-ion fire. Does the city have a procedure in place? If nothing bad could ever possibly happen at the Goleta energy storage facility, then please provide the citizens of Goleta the facts to prove it. But if it is a possibility, even as remote as a tsunami, shouldn’t the city make a plan and publicize it?
And if wildfires, and now a lithium-ion battery fire, are even remote possibilities, shouldn’t we reconsider building more and more homes without any improvements to our roads to carry all the added traffic?
Concerned citizen,
Tom Modugno
I live sort of next door to it and I DO remember a brouhsha before it was installed. It sounded at the time to be a better choice than a traditional peaker plant. We received notices as residents and there was public comment sought then. The fire danger was not an issue at the time.
Thank you for the eye opening article, Tom.
This is very concerning. Thank you for this information. Why would this have been allowed in a residential area?
Greatly informative Op Ed. Thank you for investigating this and getting the facts out. Now the question is what will the City of Goleta and the SB County elected officials and emergency services personnel do about it? Keep highlighting this issue until it is addressed.
Great article TMo. I’d say the answer is an unequivocal NO, Goleta is not ready to handle a fire there. It’s a super dense and only getting denser and more trafficky location. On a regular day it’s already congested, then we’ll be adding in Gavin’s affordable housing (= massive developments) pet project. Imagine if/when a fire breaks out in the area. I’m not sure where there is a good site for a Lithium battery time bomb facility to be, but this doesn’t look like a good spot at all. I suspect the City and County officials were all in on electric vehicles and rolled this one right through without considering fire concerns at all. Too bad. Really sad what happened up at Moss Landing. The Elkhorn Slough is a pretty unique ecological area – there aren’t that many such left in our state. Now it’s loaded with toxic battery chemicals. The folks at MBARI and Moss will probably now be looking to study the effects of the disaster on the estuary’s ecosystem – sea otters, bivalves, seabirds, fish – the whole bit will no doubt be affected by the Tesla disaster up there. That fire has to be putting the Morro Bay folks who already got wanted of another Tesla facility in their beautiful coastal town on even more guard against the program. I wouldn’t want that stuff in my backyard either. Right on the coastline too? Wow.
So are you triggered by the word “battery”? Or is it the name “Tesla”? Or does it require both, i.e. “Tesla battery”.
Beyond that, of course you post a short novel without understanding the facts.
The Moss Landing and Goleta facilities use different battery chemistry. The part of the Moss Landing facility that burned used Manganese-Cobalt chemistry, very vulnerable to fire and produce oxygen when they burn enabling essentially uncontrollable thermal runaway. The Goleta facility uses iron based batteries, 2x more difficult to burn and won’t result in thermal runaway.
Lithium Iron batteries have a higher ignition point than gasoline so they won’t ignite just sitting there at temperatures where gasoline will. They don’t produce fumes, and gas fumes can ignite at almost any temperature with a spark or flame.
Since you are so worried about safety, you should be trying to do something about the many bombs that are scattered throughout our community, ie., gas stations.
I’m not an expert at all, any scientists out there please correct me.
However, I hope that makes you feel more secure and safe.
In my research so far of this situation, the battery chemistry used in this Goleta peaker plant is LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) whereas the Moss Landing batteries use NMC (Nickel, Manganese, Cobalt). LFP batteries are much safer than NMC because they have a much lower chance of “thermal runaway” due to the more stable chemical structure. To me this means SAFER but not necessarily SAFE.
However, I definitely agree with this article that the public should know more details on fire plans and evacuation plans.