The Escondido City Council recently adopted the battery energy storage system (BESS) safety guidelines that largely mirror the county’s.Escondido acting Fire Chief Tyler Batson said the city has been working closely with the county on the guidelines.“They were doing a lot of due diligence with subject matter experts to develop a very detailed guideline moving forward on the requirements,” he said.This was after the city placed a moratorium on BESS facilities following a Sept. 5, 2024, fire at the San Diego Gas & Electric battery storage facility. That fire forced the evacuations of some nearby schools and businesses.“It really highlighted some of the possible hazards of having a BESS facility in your densely populated part of your city,” Batson said.The moratorium was set to expire in October, which was why the City Council unanimously voted to adopt the safety guidelines on July 29. That lifted the moratorium. The guidelines require any BESS facility in the city to have a fire suppression system, an explosion control system and a 100-foot setback.Batson said that’s the minimum. If the facility is in a vulnerable area, such as near a school or hospital, the setback zone increases. In addition, he said what could create even greater setbacks is the plume analysis report, which maps the smoke and contaminant fallout zones.‘This is an assessment of, based on the type of array that you have there, the types of batteries, the configuration, if you had a catastrophic event with fire, what would the plume of smoke be like?” Batson said. “So, depending on where that smoke goes, that could really increase the setbacks based on what’s surrounding that area.”Kenneth Rice, a former firefighter, applauds the city for adopting the safety guidelines.“It just needs to be built into the infrastructure,” he said. “It’s not something that you should deal with later. You want to deal with it during the construction and design process.”The safety issue came to a head two years ago when a fire broke out at a battery storage facility in Otay Mesa on May 15, 2024. It took 17 days for the fire to fully extinguish.That fire and the SDG&E fire were the reasons why residents in unincorporated Eden Valley, near Escondido, opposed the proposed Seguro Battery Storage Project. AES, the company behind the project, withdrew the plans earlier this year.The concern is that lithium-ion batteries will overheat, triggering a chemical reaction with adjacent batteries that can cause fires in a phenomenon known as thermal runaway.Because the fire is a chemical reaction, the best method is to cool the surrounding areas and let the fire burn itself out. That was the concern for Escondido resident Carlos Moreno-Zenteno. He said he’d feel safer if BESS facilities were further away from the city center.“The thing is that, environmentally wise, they say that it diminishes, but it does not diminish,” he said. “(They are) health hazards, breathing problems with the kids and everyone around Escondido.”Regardless, experts say lithium-ion batteries are currently the best way to store energy. The county said it is committed to green energy and will work with the industry to ensure any proposed battery storage system is safe.
