Vistra reports new fire in Moss Landing 300 building's unburned batteries

Vistra says its personnel identified a flare-up at about 6 a.m. Pacific time on September 18, 2026 along the north wall of the Moss Landing 300 building, the battery storage building that burned in January 2025 at its Moss Landing site in Monterey County, California, according to the site status section of the company's Moss Landing response site. The company says no injuries had been reported and that the natural gas plant on the site was temporarily shut down as a precaution.

In a later, undated update on the same page, Vistra says county officials report the fire is inactive at this time and that the U.S. EPA and the Monterey Bay Air Resources District report air quality readings within normal ranges. The Moss Landing 300 building held approximately 100,000 battery modules at the time of the January 2025 fire, Vistra says; approximately 44,000 were not burned, and 39,000 of those have been removed, de-energized and transported offsite under EPA oversight. Of the approximately 5,000 unburned modules still inside, the company believes about 1,200 ignited. Those modules were still charged, it says, because they sit in a part of the building that structural damage from the 2025 fire has kept inaccessible.

CalMatters reported on September 18, 2026 that Monterey County officials issued a shelter-in-place order that morning and that local authorities lifted it later that afternoon. It reported North County Fire Protection District Chief Jess Cortez saying the modules that ignited were inaccessible and still charged and had ignited spontaneously, and quoted him at an afternoon briefing: "They're in the smoldering stage right now." CalMatters says it updated its story to reflect Vistra's modified count of 1,200 batteries; Cortez, per the article, also said there could be further flare-ups. CalMatters also reported, citing a California Public Utilities Commission spokesperson, that the commission's investigation of the January 2025 fire is ongoing, with a root cause analysis underway.

Vistra's own page, which describes Moss 300 as a 300 MW facility, says the cause of the January 16, 2025 fire "remains unknown". Its recovery section, a separate block that carries no date either, gives a floor of "more than 34,000" intact modules removed, which the update's 39,000 satisfies, and says Vistra expects to complete removal of intact batteries from the damaged portion of the building in late 2026.