This article first appeared on Searchlight New Mexico and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
When Eldorado resident Randy Coleman met with representatives from Sen. Martin Heinrich’s office a couple of weeks ago, he received a warning. “They told me I might get called a NIMBY for being against a solar project,” he said, using the acronym for Not in My Back Yard — a derogatory term for people who don’t want progressive projects like low-income housing or wind farms located near their homes or spoiling their views. “But it’s not about that,” Coleman said. As he and others see it, the project proposed for their backyard is a genuine safety hazard.
A global energy company, AES Corp., is seeking a permit from Santa Fe County to build the Rancho Viejo Solar Project, a utility-scale solar farm with a battery energy storage system just south of Santa Fe city limits. The facility’s 200,000 solar panels would sit on about 680 acres of privately owned vacant land off of Highway 14 — roughly three miles south of Rancho Viejo, two miles west of Eldorado and 1,000 feet from Rancho San Marcos, a gated subdivision of some 90 homes.
The proposal has split nearby residents. Some see it as an important step in moving New Mexico away from climate-warming fossil fuels. But others fiercely oppose it, believing it’s a disaster waiting to happen. So deep are the concerns that neighbors have launched a grassroots group, Clean Energy Coalition for Santa Fe County, to defeat the project. They worry that it’s an untenable fire hazard, they question why AES and Santa Fe County have withheld information from the public, and they note that AES facilities around the country have contaminated the environment and left neighbors at risk.
“It’s just the wrong place for a project like this,” Coleman said.
The primary concern is the battery energy storage system, or BESS, which would allow the facility to provide power to the electric grid on demand, even at night and other times when the solar panels aren’t producing. It would consist of more than a half-million lithium-ion batteries housed in 38 containers, each 40 feet long, or about the length of a school bus.
The degradation of the batteries over time, or even a tiny manufacturing flaw, could drive the cells into thermal runaway and cause a conflagration, said Coleman, who is vice president of the Clean Energy Coalition and an electrical engineer with decades of experience working on power systems.
“There will be fires,” he said, matter-of-factly. And battery fires are notoriously difficult to extinguish: Water can exacerbate them, and the preferred suppressant, which contains PFAS “forever chemicals,”’ has limited efficacy. Should a blaze escape from the battery storage containers and ignite the surrounding grasslands, Coleman believes it could spread to Eldorado before the fire department has time to respond, with catastrophic consequences.
Camilla Brom, a physician’s assistant and resident of Rancho San Marcos who started the group New Mexicans for Responsible Renewable Energy, put it this way: “It’s like taking a lit candle into a barn full of hay. A project like this shouldn’t be put near people’s homes.” Neither Coleman nor Brom opposes solar projects, even with battery storage — they just think the proposed site is too close to residential areas.
Fires feed concerns
AES storage systems have indeed caught fire in the past. In 2019, at a BESS in Surprise, Arizona, a “cascading thermal runaway event” began with the failure of a single battery. When first responders opened the steel structure that housed the BESS, letting in oxygen, a mixture of gases exploded and the fire captain was “ballistically propelled” backward 73 feet and under a chain-link fence. The incident sent eight firefighters to the hospital, four of them with serious injuries.
Another AES-owned BESS project caught fire and burned for more than 10 days in Chandler, Arizona, in 2022. There were no injuries, but nearby businesses and residents were asked to evacuate several times during the first week that the fire smoldered, in case toxic gases spread from the scene.
Other BESS fires have erupted at non-AES facilities, including two at Moss Landing, California, in 2022, one of which required telling nearby communities to shelter in place for 12 hours and close their windows and ventilation systems. Three fires also occurred in New York state last year over a two-month period. Though the blazes didn’t spread and it was later determined that no “significant off-site migration of contaminants” occurred, nearby roads had to be closed, train service was disrupted, a festival was postponed and at least one shelter-in-place order was issued.
A quandary for neighbors nationwide
The incidents have stirred fears and resistance around the country, where communities from New York and Maryland to California are trying to replace dirty fossil fuels with clean renewable energy. Neighbors might embrace the green aspects of the projects, but they blanch at the battery containers and possible fire and toxic gas hazards.
While AES acknowledges that battery storage systems have “inherent risks,” Joshua Mayer, lead developer of the Rancho Viejo Solar Project, says the Fortune 500 company has learned a lot from its two Arizona fires, which resulted in design changes. “The energy storage technology planned for the Rancho Viejo project will look and operate very differently from the technology used just a few years ago,” Mayer said in an email. “We understand the technical and safety management of thermal hazards at a much greater level of detail today.”
Industry-wide safety protocols have also been extensively revamped, based on experience. Rule number one when dealing with a container fire could have been gleaned from the old tale of Bluebeard, or any number of horror movies: Don’t open the door.
Warren Thompson of the Rancho Viejo Limited Partnership, which owns the land that AES would lease for the Santa Fe County project, isn’t concerned about fire or smoke hazards, even though he lives in Rancho Viejo. “The fire suppression system is state-of-the-art,” he said in a phone interview. “Everything is containerized, and it’s surrounded by a gravel boundary — a noncombustible buffer zone. I’m not worried at all.”
According to research from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), which collects and analyzes data about BESS fires, “the technology’s overall safety record is strong and improving.” The failure rate hovers around 1 or 2 percent, and there were about the same number of fires in 2023 as there were in 2019, “even as global battery deployments have increased 20-fold.”
History breeds distrust
The EPRI data suggests that grid-scale lithium-ion battery storage is largely reliable. But before people will believe that their lives, their homes and their dreams for the future are going to be safe, they have to trust the intentions and veracity of those telling them not to worry. In other words, before concerned residents can be convinced that the Rancho Viejo Solar Project won’t be among the small percentage of BESS facilities that do catch fire, they have to feel confident that AES cares about them and is being transparent. At this point, plenty of people don’t.
Lee Zlotoff, one of the founders of the Clean Energy Coalition, questions how interested AES truly is in keeping the community safe. “They have a history of playing fast and loose with communities around the world,” said Zlotoff, an Eldorado resident and the creator of the TV series “MacGyver.”
At an AES coal-fired power plant in Puerto Rico, for example, improperly disposed toxic coal ash — the waste material from burning coal — has contaminated the water, soil and air. A study by the University of Puerto Rico School of Public Health found that nearby communities have unusually high rates of respiratory, cardiovascular and skin diseases, as well as cancers. Locals and environmental watchdogs criticize AES’s remediation plan as woefully insufficient.
Closer to home, an AES-owned plant in Indiana has reportedly dumpedover a million gallons of untreated water contaminated with coal ash into the White River on a daily basis. The water has been stored for decades in unlined containment ponds that leach into the groundwater. In response to critics, an AES spokesperson told the Indianapolis Business Journal that residents’ health and safety is the company’s priority.
Zlotoff finds this hard to believe. Why would AES care about us, his logic goes, if they don’t appear to care about other communities?
A lawsuit and alleged violations
If conveying openness and transparency are needed to build trust, AES and Santa Fe County have additional ground to make up. During an hour-long interview, Camilla Brom focused as much on the way the solar project has been introduced as on the fire risks it might pose.
Brom described a county meeting at which commissioners changed permitting regulations to allow for battery storage systems, but without announcing the plans to do so: “It was a violation of the Open Meetings Act,” she alleged. She spoke of closed meetings between AES, Thompson and the Rancho San Marcos board that “shouldn’t have been closed. It raised concerns.” And she said AES didn’t send out letters about upcoming meetings to all residents who should have been notified.
A retired chief hearing officer for New Mexico’s Public Regulation Commission agrees with Brom’s interpretations. In August 2023, Ashley Schannauer submitted a Notice of Violation to Santa Fe County, alleging that three county meetings about the solar project violated New Mexico’s Open Meetings Act. The county denied the allegations.
Shannauer followed up in September 2023, filing a 37-page Open Meetings Act complaint with the New Mexico attorney general, alleging irregularities in the way meeting agendas were announced. The AG’s office, in a head-scratching response, said no violations occurred but failed to address Shannauer’s main point: that the county’s agenda notices never mentioned a discussion about the definition of commercial solar plants, denying the public the opportunity to weigh in.
Adding to its public relations woes, AES sued Santa Fe County in September, asking for a temporary restraining order to prevent the county from publicly disclosing certain technical specifications about the solar project, declaring them trade secrets. The court gave preliminary approval to AEC’s request. As a result, community members haven’t been able to access complete information about the battery storage system — information they believe is crucial to understanding the potential risks.
Whether or not that’s true, the court decision and alleged meeting violations left some residents with the impression that AES has something to hide.
Santa Fe County, for its part, seems to have been caught on the back foot by the public backlash. When asked why the county hasn’t shared more information or held public hearings, spokesperson Olivia Romo said in an email that AES hasn’t yet completed its permit application, and pledged more community engagement once it was finalized. A permit will only be approved if it “will not be detrimental to the health, safety and general welfare of the area, and will not create a potential hazard for fire, panic or other danger,” she added. All those things will be assessed, she said, after AES’s final permit application is submitted.
And when will that happen? The specific timeline for submitting the finalized application “is a bit indefinite right now,” Mayer, the AES project developer, said in an email.
Doubts and contracts
Information gaps have meanwhile been filled with inferences and assumptions. Zlotoff and others believe, among other things, that AES is greenwashing — misleading the public by exaggerating the project’s environmental benefits.
Zlotoff, for example, thinks AES actually intends to buy power from the electric grid when it’s cheap, store it in the batteries, and then sell it back when rates are high — a strategy known as arbitrage. “The solar [project] is just a cover for the battery storage,” he said. He posits that AES would sell the power to out-of-state markets, where energy prices top New Mexico’s. “AES gets all the benefits,” he said, “while we absorb all the risk.”
The prospective buyer of the power— Public Service Co. of New Mexico — rejects this theory entirely.
“When we have a contract, it’s completely exclusive and the vendor cannot sell energy to anyone else,” said Raymond Sandoval, a spokesman for PNM, the state’s largest electricity provider. “PNM charges and discharges the battery at its sole discretion, and operates the facility to the sole benefit of PNM customers.” While acknowledging that “there really isn’t a way to know where the power is going to go,” Sandoval said PNM wants to “use it first here in New Mexico.” If there’s excess energy in the system, that could be sold out of state and the profits used to reduce rates for PNM customers, he added. If PNM and AES reach an agreement on the project, he assumes the generated energy mostly would be sent to Santa Fe and Albuquerque.
Mayer, of AES, explained that the company would charge PNM a flat monthly rate and “turn the keys over to the utility,” which would use the power however it likes. AES itself wouldn’t be able to pull power from the grid and resell it, he said.
Trust in some corners
Some locals who have thought long and hard about the wisdom of the solar project have concluded that the time is right to support the idea.
Jill Cliburn, who lives off of Highway 14, has worked in solar and clean energy for 45 years and is a past board member of both Solar Energy International and the American Solar Energy Society. At first, she was skeptical of the Rancho Viejo Solar Project. “But then I saw a news story about a typhoon in India, with people carrying everything they owned through a flood, and it hit me, the kind of privilege involved with being opposed to a climate solution.” And she thought about the EPRI data. And she changed her mind.
“I understand the attitude of ‘I don’t want them to experiment on me,’” she said. “But solar and battery storage are far enough along these days. The technology is getting better, safer, every year.”
Cliburn is anything but cavalier about it. “This doesn’t minimize the importance to the community of holding businesses to high standards,” she said. “We need to have a permit process that assures people that risks are being managed. We all have to accept that things will change, that things will be different in the future — and we need to be vigilant as we continue to raise the bar.”
For Zlotoff, however, it’s too late for AES to build trust. “I don’t think a company like this is the right fit for New Mexico,” he said.
Solar snapshot
According to AES, the Rancho Viejo Solar Project would produce more than 277,315 megawatt-hours of electricity annually — enough clean energy to offset nearly 120,000 tons of CO2 emissions while powering more than 30,000 homes. Among other details:
- The project would sit on roughly 680 acres of an 8,200-acre site.
- Its 200,000 solar panels would generate 96 megawatts of power.
- Its lithium-ion battery energy storage system, sitting on two acres in the site’s northeast corner, would store 277.8 megawatt-hours of energy — enough to send 48 megawatts of power to PNM’s electric grid for four hours.
- A new overhead transmission line about two miles long would connect the project to the grid.
- It’s part of a national boom in solar and wind projects with battery storage. By year’s end, the amount of energy stored in these battery systems could nearly double, rising from 16 to 30 gigawatts. That’s enough to power more than 20 million homes.
