The Unreported Story Of Grid Scale Battery Fires

The geniuses who are planning New York’s energy future think that they can make intermittent wind and solar generators work to power the electrical grid by the simple device of providing some battery storage. The idea is that when there is abundant wind and sun, they can store up the power for use during those calm and dark periods in the winter. How much battery storage will that take? It’s a simple arithmetic calculation, but none of our supposed experts have taken the trouble to crunch the numbers.

Nevertheless, without any kind of feasibility study of whether this will work, they soldier forth building large grid-scale battery storage facilities. The battery building program is under way, at least to some degree, and a few such facilities are actually complete and operating out in the rural parts of the state. Meanwhile, there are plans for some much larger such facilities in New York City, including right in some of its most densely-populated sections. Is there any problem with this that we ought to know about?

In a post back in March 2024, I reported on the progress of our two “climate leader” states with developing grid-scale battery storage. It turned out that the big problem was that these facilities were subject to large and dangerous fires on a regular basis. In some cases the same facility would catch fire multiple times. That post reported on major fires in California at a site called Valley Center in San Diego County in September 2023, and at another one called Moss Landing south of San Francisco in September 2022. In January 2025, the Moss Landing facility had another major fire. From the EPA website:

On January 16, 2025, the Moss Landing 300 battery energy storage system at the Moss Landing Vistra power plant (Monterey County, Calif.) caught fire.

There were prior fires at the Moss Landing facility in September 2021 and February 2022.

Back here in New York, my March 2024 post reported on no fewer than three major fires at grid battery storage facilities in this state that had taken place during 2023. The following quote came from a piece at Canary Media from August 2023:

New York state is grappling with how to adjust its ambitious buildout of clean energy storage after fires broke out at three separate battery projects between late May and late July [2023]. . . . First, on May 31, a battery that NextEra Energy Resources had installed at a substation in East Hampton caught fire. . . . Then, on June 26, fire alarms went off at two battery units owned and operated by Convergent Energy and Power in Warwick, Orange County; one of those later caught fire. On July 27, a different Convergent battery at a solar farm in Chaumont caught fire and burned for four days straight.

Might you have the idea that these fires are becoming less frequent over time? If so, that’s only because these fires are one of those things — like the Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota — that the liberal media just don’t choose to report. It turns out that the Convergent Energy facility in Warwick, New York had another big fire just last week. From Etica AG, December 22:

Late on the evening of December 19, 2025, a fire occurred at the Church Street Battery Storage Facility in Warwick, New York, operated by Convergent Energy & Power. While no injuries were reported and the fire was confined to a single container, the incident remained active into the following day and prompted a multi-agency response, air quality monitoring, and renewed scrutiny of battery energy storage system (BESS) safety in the community. For Warwick residents and local leaders, the fire carried added weight. The town has experienced multiple battery storage incidents in recent years, and each new event raises difficult questions about risk, emergency response, and whether existing BESS designs are suitable for locations near homes, schools, and small businesses.

I can’t find any mention of this battery fire at the New York Times or at major media sites like CNN or the major television networks.

The Convergent Energy Warwick energy storage facility has a capacity of 12 MW and 57 MWh. Meanwhile, back here in New York City, there are plans, well advanced (although not quite yet under construction), to build a much larger grid battery storage facility in Ravenswood, Queens. That would be right on the East River, directly across from East Midtown and the Upper East Side of Manhattan:

You can see on the map how close much of Manhattan is to this facility. To be fair, the wind usually blows the other way, but the parts of Queens near this facility are also very densely populated. Something called Queensbridge Houses — the largest public housing project in the country — is immediately adjacent.

The planned capacity of the battery storage facility in Ravenswood is 316 MW/2528 MWh — some 25 or more times the size of the facility in Warwick that has now caught fire at least twice.

A New York agency going by the name NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority) is leading the charge to build these energy storage facilities, including in densely populated areas like Queens. On their website, they have a page touting the new battery storage project at the Ravenswood location. Believe it or not, their sales pitch is that the new battery facility is cleaner and greener than the prior natural gas power plants on the site. Here is a quote they take from Queens Borough President Donovan Richards:

“The days of environmental and economic injustice in Western Queens, especially for our historically marginalized public housing families, are coming to an end. As we prepare to transform the Ravenswood Generating Station into a clean energy producer, it’s critical that the surrounding community reaps the benefits of that transition,” said Borough President Richards.

I just did a quick calculation.

I got rooftop solar and I live in sunny California. During the summer months it produces tons of electricity with most of it being fed into the grid. And it produces quite a bit more for the whole year than we use. But in the 3 winter months, it falls short of what I consume by about 400kwh/month.

That means that for me to go off the grid, I would have to store 1200kwh in batteries in the summer months and hold in reserve for the winter.

To do that it would take about 100 of the biggest Powerwall batteries at a cost of $13000/battery, or around $1.6 million!!

I managed to get the solar installed under the old net metering plan where pg&e credits me roughly one to one with the power I feed them, and I give them more than they give me so I pay them little or nothing during the year but I get some cash rebate at the end of the year for the excess I give them.

So pg&e is acting as an infinite battery for me (and people like me) and saving me (and hundreds of thousands like me) $1.6 million in the process.

In other words they’re getting royally screwed. No wonder electricity rates here are about 50cents/kwh double and triple that of some saner states. Actually it’s the ratepayers without solar who are getting screwed by having to pay the exhorbitant rates.

They did make a change in the new net metering plan. Now if you have solar, any energy you use from the grid you pay pretty close to the full amount, there is no one-to-one offset like the old plan. You do get a bit of credit for the excess you feed the grid, but it’s only 3cents/kwh!

This seems a lot fairer all around. It also makes little sense to go solar (too little benefit) and as a result solar installs have cratered here in sunny California.

But I’m glad I snuck under the old rules.

One last piece of calculation.

If the batteries would cost my household 1.6 mil, and the whole national grid went solar, and there are 100 million households, that means it would require a minimum of 1 billion batteries at a cost of $13 trillions!! That’s just the batteries, not all the infrastructure associated with that. So you can probably double that number - 26 trillions!!

Did I do that right?

“DC power doesn’t transmit across long distances well.”

Actually, for transmitting hundreds of megawatts of power very long distances (multiple hundreds of miles), it is ideal.

The problem with AC power is that a transmission line is big antenna. This doesn’t matter for house wiring, and probably isn’t much of problem for most local distribution, but it is for very long distance high power transmission.

For example, “the Pacific Direct Current Intertie (PDCI) is a 1354 km, ±500 kV, 3.22 GW, HVDC transmission line from northern Oregon to southern California” (https://newunivstudies.org/aec/electricity/hvdc/pdci/). Given that the wavelength of 60 Hz AC is about 4997 km, this transmission line is about 0.27 of 1 wavelength, or close to 1/4 wavelength.

Quarter wavelength antennas are perhaps the most widely used type in the world (being a good tradeoff between size and efficiency). Now 0.27 wavelength is hardly optimal, but it will radiate (inefficiently) at 60 Hz, thereby wasting a LOT of electrical energy by both radiation and wavelength mismatch losses.

That’s why a lot of new power distribution system, from Canada and Europe to China and Brazil, are going with High Voltage DC (https://newunivstudies.org/aec/electricity/hvdc/).

P.S. I visited the north converter station of the PDCI in the mid 60’s, and it was very impressive. When I was in that area in the 80’s, it was closed to the public (security reasons).

Sorry for the tardiness, but here’s my answer to the question you tried to answer:

Transformers. High Voltage transformers pretty much all come from China now (why not, since they’ll ‘always’ be our friend, LOL), and now have a 6-year lead time, mostly due to demand (data centers and the power for them, for starters).

So, you find an existing substation that was anticipating a larger growth in load and you hook up to it. Free access to high voltage lines! (or at least no waiting time, which is important when you’re relying on government handouts to help with funding) That is exactly what happened where I live - the battery farm one a mile away from me is right across the street from an existing substation and now connected to it. As far as the concerns of neighbors, not a problem since you likely have deeper pockets than the opposition...and the opposition will not get any help from NGOs, the Sierra Club, or judges.

Needless to say, nothing is free, so us rate-payers will wind up having to pay for the much earlier expansion of this substation, when that time comes.

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