to remain offline until safety is guaranteed.” In the meantime, concerned residents staring down battery plants in other parts of the country can take some solace in the fact that Vistra’s Moss Landing facility was one of a kind, conceived and designed before modern safety standards were adopted for large grid batteries. Battery safety standards have been updated multiple times since it was built. It may sound counterintuitive to think of a storage plant completed in 2020 as outdated. But the grid battery industry has evolved at a rapid pace since then — it’s now the second-biggest source of new U.S. grid capacity, behind solar power. In that short time, the storage industry has matured through a process of trial and error that has included several high-profile fires. None of these have killed anyone, but a pivotal battery explosion in Arizona in 2019 injured four emergency responders and forced a major reappraisal of grid storage plant design. The industry has also improved the batteries themselves since then, but those upgrades came after construction of Vistra’s landmark battery behemoth. Moss Landing’s design was