Summary: After a thermal runaway set the world’s largest battery storage facility on fire last winter near Monterey, Ivano Aiello and his colleagues at San José State University had some detective work to do.
The fire, which broke out at the Vistra Energy Storage Facility in Moss Landing on Jan. 16, 2025 burned for days, producing a plume of black smoke that was visible for miles (see image on the next page).
“There was obvious debris related to the fire pretty much all over the place, so it was evidence that something came out from the smoke plume,” said Aiello, a professor and chair at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories.
To understand exactly what the fire spread, Aiello and his colleagues began to investigate. Their results, published in the journal Scientific Reports, were released Monday, December 1, 2025…
