By a bare 4-to-3 margin, The Chino Planning Commission on Wednesday, July 15 shot down AYPA Power’s request to develop a 400-megawatt battery energy storage system facility between Benson Avenue and Oaks Avenue, south of Shaefer Avenue and north of Edison Avenue on industrially-zoned property adjacent to residentially-zoned property.
The decision comes after multiple other cities in California, including ones in San Bernardino County, have struggled with safety issues relating to dense energy storage facility dependent upon lithium batteries, which are vulnerable to “runaway thermal” in circumstances in which the integrity of their containers have been breached.
While the project site technically is within an industrial zone and proximate to the Edison Corridor and its power lines which span a swath running virtually the entire width of the city, it also lies roughly 900 feet from the city’s premier recreation amenity, Ayala Park, and is close to residential neighborhoods.
AYPA Power’s proposal, referred to as the Dirac project, is the logical outgrowth of a surge in the popularity of battery storage facilities in that they provide rapid solutions to unprecedented power demands such as those from artificial intelligence and data centers, prevent rolling blackouts during extreme weather, and store cheap renewable energy for use during expensive peak hours.
There is countervailing concern about the safety of such elements of the electrical infrastructure and the need to locate them in places where explosions or fires, while rare, will not immediately spread to areas of concentrated populations.
The Dirac project would store up to 400 megawatts, sufficient to power about 400,000 single-family homes with about eight hours of electricity, according to the city. It was to have been built on a 13.89-acre site with the addresses of 13925 Benson Avenue, 13822 Oaks Avenue, and 13910 Oaks Avenue, north of a Southern California Edison substation.
The Dirac project is to consist of a battery energy storage system composed of lithium iron phosphate batteries, which are capable of roughly three to five times greater energy density than lead acid batteries. Lithium iron phosphate batteries utilize cobalt, nickel and manganese in their cathodes, and are substantially lighter than traditional lead acid batteries. Nevertheless, when used for the purposes of standby energy storage as a back-up to power grid, they exist in great quantity and are quire large. They have an outer housing that is intended to be resilient and relatively rugged. Those containers, however, if hit with a sufficient vector of force, can be punctured. If jostled or banged, a container or its contents can be compromised, along with the internal structure of the battery itself, causing the separator between the anode and cathode to fail, creating a short circuit. This generates intense heat and a chain reaction, referred to as thermal runaway, which vaporizes the flammable electrolyte and produces highly combustible gases. As pressure builds up inside the cell, those gases are likely to ignite, leading to a fire or explosion. This can lead to proximate batteries being compromised and the conflagration intensifying.
Illustrations of such a hazard occurred in two separate incidents in Arizona, one on April 19, 2019 in Surprise and another three years and two days later in Chandler on April 21, 2022. The battery systems involved in those mishaps are similar in design but well below one-twentieth of the energy storage capability of what AYPA Power was considering in Chino. The failures with both resulted in explosions and fires of near-catastrophic proportion.
The battery system in Surprise that exploded in 2019 was storing energy for Arizona Public Service Company, and exploded when it was smoldering and fire crews opened a door to ventilate the facility.
The facility in Chandler had been constructed beginning in 2018 and held electricity in reserve for the Arizona Power Grid, with a capacity to store four hours of electricity with an output of 10 megawatts of power, enough to power 2,500 homes.
In 2022, at a location much closer to Chino than Arizona, the City of Upland began contemplating allowing a large-scale lithium battery storage facility to be set up there when Portland, Oregon–based GridStor, in partnership with Upland Reliability Project Holdings, LLC, started preparing to build a 120-megawatt standalone battery energy storage project in the Sycamore Hills district of North Upland. The project was part of a broader push by California to expand renewable energy capacity and grid reliability, aligning with state goals to reach 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045. The facility was intended to store solar energy generated locally and feed it back into the grid to support renewable integration.
By late 2023, the project had been in development for about a year, with corporate officers establishing Upland Reliability Project Holdings in September 2022 and securing property in Upland. However, in October 2023, GridStor and its partner abandoned the plan, as community opposition, particularly in a residential area in the north part of Upland mounted.
In January 2025, in the community of Moss Landing in Monterey County, a thermal runaway in the Vistra Battery Plant there wreaked an estimated $400 million in damage. Meanwhile, California officials continue with the march to expand renewable energy capacity, which carries with it the need from energy storage. In Chino, that manifested as the Dirac project proposal.
Ultimately, or at least penultimately, it turned out, the decision to shelve the project in Upland was replicated this week when the planning commission in Chino, or at least a majority of it, developed cold feet with regard to the even larger undertaking that AYPA Power was proposing.
Members of the community weighed in before the planning commission took the matter up for discussion on July 15. Several Chino residents submitted comments regarding the project by email.
Donna Casas called the battery storage facility a “horrible idea that would be in a densely populated area.”
Another resident, Rafael Gutierrez offered his view.
“While I support clean energy initiatives in appropriately zoned regional areas, placing a massive, utility-scale industrial battery plant immediately adjacent to residential neighborhoods and less than a mile from local schools creates an unacceptable risk to public health, safety, and welfare,” Gutierrez said.
Chirag Patel said, “Lithium-ion facilities of this magnitude present inherent, unpreventable risks of thermal runaway.”
Terrea Curie asked the commission, “What independent risk assessment has been conducted, and can the public review it?”
Chino resident Justin Alcober asserted that city needed to have a far more formalized and well-thought-through set of standards for the project than what was being proposed.
“This is Chino’s first BESS and the city has no standards for it,” Alcober wrote. Chino is therefore being asked to set its battery energy storage system precedent at the maximum possible scale without an ordinance establishing minimum setbacks from residences, parks, schools, child care facilities [or] permitted battery chemistries and enclosure standards [or] maximum facility size or aggregate capacity within city limits [or] required fire mitigation, monitoring, and third-party testing thresholds [or] emergency response evacuation triggers and notification protocols [or] decommissioning and financial assurance requirements. Approving a 400 MW facility as Chino’s first BESS, with no ordinance in place, means the project itself becomes the standard. Every future applicant will point to Dirac’s approval as the baseline. I respectfully submit that the commission should not allow a private developer’s application to write the city’s energy storage policy by default.”
Debbie Pinedo asked, “Who’s liable if something goes wrong? Does the development agreement include any insurance, bonding or indemnification requirements protecting the city and nearby property owners in the event of a fire or contamination event?
Rexford Industrial supported the project, as did Chris Chavez, the deputy policy director
of the Coalition for Clean Air.
City Attorney Fred Galante acknowledged that the city code and its existing development standards do not explicitly set in place even minimal safety measures for such facilities, the proponent would be bound by what was specified in the development agreement for the project that the planning commission was being asked to sign off on. Somewhat casually, Galante told the planning commission and the public that he simply cloned the standards contained in the City of Irwindale’s municipal code relating to battery energy storage facilities. Irwindale’s city attorney is Adrian Guerra, who is a partner in the same firm Galante works for, Aleshire & Wynder. Galante said the development agreement, special conditional use permit and site approval for the project and development agreement would “help make sure that we covered all those bases.”
Galante’s blasé attitude, however, seriously angered a number people. For starters, Irwindale is, essentially, and industrial city, with a population of 1,470, slightly more than 1.5 percent of Chino’s 96,957 residents. Galante was attempting to “mickey-mouse” the protections that should be layered into the city’s approval of the project, one resident fumed.
Others said Glante’s approach to the approval of the project raised the specter of graft and/or improper influence after it was pointed out that AYPA Power is pursuing an identical 400-megawatt battery energy storage system in Irwindale.
The chairwoman of the planning commission, Lissa Fraga, indicated her belief that both the city and the commission were essentially flying blind with regard to battery energy storage systems in that there is no set policy relating to them or standards for their design and the safety precautions that must be taken in conjunction with their construction and siting.
“I’m struggling,” Fraga said. “We don’t have a BESS ordinance in place for the city.”
She said giving the project go-ahead would “set [a] precedent not just for ourselves, but surrounding cities.”
A vote to approve the project failed on a 3-to-4 vote of the commission.