In my part of California we fear catastrophic wild fire caused by climate change. People have lost their homes and many have died. And California is shaping up to have its earliest and possibly worst fire season ever. That’s why I support battery facilities in spite of their relatively minor risk of fire compared to climate change-enabled fire risks.

Thanks, Andrew. Actually, I covered a two-day conference on that very topic a little over a decade ago. That news is now old, the tech has changed remarkably since then, but the concern — at the level of being watchful, not of slowing down deployment — is very much warranted.

Your note gives me an opportunity to clarify something important. The point of this story was not to undercut batteries as an essential, practical, affordable part of the transition that is ready and beginning to scale. It was to fulfill our role as community media to reliably tell the whole story, not just issue a quasi-news release. There will inevitably be cautions or even very bad news in any sector, clean energy included, and we don’t help anyone or anything if we just wash it away — that’s what the fossil, nuclear, and CCS industries do, and clean energy needs to be better than that. When we run something cautionary, we’re just doing our job and, I hope, making our contribution to the greater goal.

We feel like we would be the “sacrifice zone” while an out of state, Fortune 500 company, makes a heafty profit. There needs to be more regulation of placement of these BESS facilities. A residential neighborhood is that LAST place these should be located.