Vistra Energy, a Texas-based power company, long had plans to build and operate a 600-megawatt battery storage facility on about 24 acres of a 107-acre waterfront property in the city of Morro Bay. The site is a retired oil-and-gas fired power plant owned by Vistra. The company withdrew its application in April 2025, which turned out to be a smart move. The Morro Bay City Council last week unanimously passed a permanent ban on battery plants within the city limits, months after enacting a temporary moratorium.
While state law says that local approval for the project can be bypassed, the city has an ally in Sacramento. The project would require approval from both the California Energy Commission and the California Coastal Commission, the latter expressing significant environmental and land-use concerns about the project in an August 2024 letter to the city.
It’s hard to be critical of the city’s decision. The community is troubled by last year’s battery fire a couple of hours up the road in Monterey County’s Moss Landing. That fire burned for several days. It was dangerous enough for county officials to declare a state of emergency and evacuate 1,200 residents. It was not the first fire at the facility, nor the last. The burned remains of the January 2025 fire reignited in September 2026, causing officials to order nearby residents to shelter in place. Moss Landing has the distinction of being both one of the largest — if not the largest — battery farms in the world, and also the site of one of the world’s largest battery facility fires in history.
Sometimes NIMBYism is a reasonable position.
Morro Bay’s decision is in direct conflict with the state’s green ambitions and will impact more than the local community. If California is to meet its target to have a zero-emissions power supply by 2045, it will require a massive expansion of industrial-scale battery facilities to store energy when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun isn’t shining. With a precedent on the board, which locality will next say no to a proposed battery farm and further hamper the state’s ambitions?
The governor’s office tells us that 52,000 megawatts of battery storage needs to be available in less than 20 years. The total now is less than half that — 23,000 megawatts. It took a little more than seven years to reach that point, starting at 700 megawatts in early 2019, says the California Energy Commission.
Even if that goal is reached, the batteries need wind and solar farms to generate energy to be stored, and it’s not a sure thing that those sources will be built out enough to provide an adequate supply. NIMBYs have been stonewalling renewable projects all over the world, even in we’re-so-green California, where local governments have blocked projects in unincorporated areas.
Battery performance itself is also in question. Their job is to resolve the intermittency challenges of wind and solar. There are, however, physical and economic realities that can’t be ignored. While utility-scale batteries have value in providing “valuable short-term support to the grid,” says the National Center for Energy Analytics, they “are not long-duration, dispatchable power sources.” In addition to being “energy sinks that carry significant economic and environmental costs,” their storage capabilities are short, from one to four hours.
Unless these limits are clearly understood, the NCEA says investments and regulatory regimes “could undermine energy reliability and security while misallocating and depleting raw materials, energy, finances, and other resources.” This would intensify the environmental concerns that batteries are supposed to solve while misdirecting “much-needed investment in peak-power-capable, dispatchable energy generation infrastructure toward short-term, energy-consuming storage infrastructure.”
Maybe the shortcomings will be overcome by 2045. But what about before then? Are Californians expected to live with a system that is already vulnerable and could easily grow worse as reliable sources of power are taken down?
Like the perpetually stalled high-speed rail, a carbon-free power supply is a “big hairy audacious” project separated by a yawning gap between expectation and reality. Granted, the energy transition has moved more smoothly than the train, but Morro Bay is telling us that things are only going to get harder.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute and co-author of The California Left Coast Survivor’s Guide.