(Just The News)—Renewable energy advocates have long called for building battery complexes to store intermittent solar and wind energy, but a recent fire that spewed toxic heavy metals all around a California battery storage facility that went up in flames have some leaders wondering whether the new technology is worth the risk and environmental cost.
A few weeks ago in Monterey a massive grid-scale battery-powered energy storage facility went up in flames, spewing burnt battery material into the air. Now, scientists at San Jose State University have found extremely high levels of toxic heavy metals — hundreds to thousands of times higher than before — in the area near the fire, despite the Environmental Protection Agencies initial claims that the fire did not release toxins.
“These nanoparticles are used in cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries, commonly referred to as ‘NMC’ (nickel manganese cobalt), clearly connecting the occurrence of the heavy metals to airborne cathode material from the Vistra battery fire,” wrote SJSU in a statement. “These heavy metals will chemically transform as they move through the environments and potentially through the food web, affecting local aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.”
“These findings and the research that follows are crucial not only to the impacted community but to the national and international community because of the need to store more power and thus build more and larger battery storage facilities,” said research team head and SJSU Professor Ivano Aiello. “This is a new and fast-growing technology, and we must understand the ecological impacts in the event that accidents like this happen again.”
When fully finished in 2021, the Vistra Corporation’s 400 megawatt battery center was the largest in the world, and operates under an agreement with Pacific Gas and Electric.
“The state’s laudable immense buildout of intermittent renewable power has both lowered emissions and presented a reliability challenge. California produces an excess amount of renewable power during the day while the sun is up, but often struggles to meet demand as the sun goes down,” said Vistra CEO Curt Morgan at the time. “Our Moss Landing battery system helps to fill that reliability gap, storing the excess daytime power so it doesn’t go to waste and then releasing it to the grid when it’s needed most.”
PGE’s consumers already pay some of the highest energy rates in the United States at about 40 cents per kilowatt hour — more than double the national 17-cent average and approaching the 50-cent rate at which it’s cheaper to drive a sedan on costly California gasoline than on grid-supplied electrons. Should they be found liable for this fire and its contamination, as has happened with the wildfires that were sparked by its infrastructure, rates for its customers, which increased 127% between 2014 and 2024, could increase even faster than before.
KQED says residents have reported unusual breathing issues, metallic tastes in their mouths, headaches, nausea, nosebleeds, and low energy.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nickel exposure can cause rashes, respiratory problems, and “effects on the stomach, blood, liver, kidneys, immune system, reproduction, and development.” The CDC says high levels of manganese exposure can irritate the lungs, cause behavioral changes, induce neural and reproductive harm, and damage children’s brains and development. The CDC says cobalt exposure can cause respiratory, blood, thyroid, gastrointestinal, reproductive, and developmental harm and is likely a human carcinogen.
Assemblymember Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, shared her concern that the facility has done more harm to the environment than good.
“I am alarmed and deeply concerned to hear that high concentrations of heavy-metals have been identified within one of our most cherished and fragile ecosystems, Elkhorn Slough and its surrounding areas. These concentrations are directly linked to the battery energy storage fire,” said Addis on X. “True climate solutions must benefit — not harm — our communities and natural environment. We have to continue to fight for the inclusion of community voices and proper siting of battery energy storage facilities.”
Addis has followed up by announcing a bill that would require buffer zones between battery storage sites and communities or ecologically fragile areas, and require local engagement in permitting, instead of allowing state agencies to give approval on their own.
Vistra is currently seeking to build a new, larger 600 megawatt facility in scenic Morro Bay, but placed its local permit on pause in October as it sought approval through the state instead.
Addis’ bill, combined with public outcry and possible health and environmental consequences from the fire at its neighboring Moss Landing facility, could make it more difficult for Morro Bay and other battery storage projects across the state to move forward, and serve as a warning for similar projects nationwide.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.