In January 2025, California’s Moss Landing fire evacuated 1,500 residents and incinerated more than 50,000 batteries. As has been the case in similar incidents, the blaze and its chemical run-off were so dangerous that firefighters were forced to let it burn itself out. And it made an impression on the market. These high-profile lithium-ion battery fires have triggered community pushback, a wave of local moratoriums, and updated fire codes across the country.
The increase in local opposition comes even as batteries are being deployed at record levels: 18.9 gigawatts (GW) installed in the U.S. in 2025, a 50% increase from 2024, according to the latest numbers. But this total could be even higher.
For the past decade, the storage industry has attempted to convince host communities that lithium-ion safety is a solved problem. The public is no longer buying it. The result is a stark new reality for developers; permitting delays and public resistance are slowing projects at the very moment the grid needs accelerated growth.
This signals an urgent industry imperative: The market needs safer chemistries to scale responsibly — not because the incumbent technologies aren’t up to the task of storing energy, but because many communities are reluctant to accept the risks.
Why lithium-ion has hit a wall
The scale of BESS pushback is significant: At least 96 battery projects have faced public pushback since 2021. Local bans have accelerated sharply, with moratorium adoption jumping in 2023 and 2024 just as BESS deployment took off. While 2025 was a record-year for battery storage installation, developers still cancelled 79 GW of battery storage capacity nationwide, with public opposition and outright bans cited as a major factor.
This is hitting developers’ bottom lines. Projects now require increasingly strict safety requirements — such as UL 9540A testing and NFPA 855 standards — that extend timelines and drive up costs. While these signal a well-regulated industry, fire permit delays are creating complexity for storage projects meant to be key components of power purchase agreements and other commercial contracts, and the broader clean energy economy as a whole. Underwriters now require extensive documentation of safety systems and emergency protocols before providing coverage.
The question is no longer whether developers want alternatives, but whether they can afford to continue navigating escalating costs and regulatory complexity. To unlock new sites, regain public trust, and stabilize project economics, the industry must decouple high performance from high hazard.
A call to pivot
Public resistance focuses on fire and toxicity risks, not energy storage itself. In fact, survey data reveal that Americans support deploying more batteries for cost savings and local job creation reasons.
Non-flammable, non-toxic battery cell chemistries eliminate the root cause of concern. Chemistries like advanced sodium-ion that can demonstrate higher safety performance eliminate the need for complex suppression infrastructure. Lower fire risk allows for deployment in constrained or previously off-limits locations: dense urban cores, rooftops, basements, industrial co-location, and disaster-vulnerable areas. This directly addresses the opposition that is blocking projects today.
Wider ranges for safe operation — between -40 and 60 degrees Celsius — reduce the need for intensive management systems and expensive cooling equipment, cutting both capital and operating expenses. Simpler requirements compress balance-of-plant costs and improve the levelized cost of storage. Streamlined permitting and lower insurance premiums improve financing timelines and internal rates of return.
Why lithium-ion dominated – until now
Of course, these safer alternatives have long kept a relatively low profile. For the last three decades, lithium-ion’s advantages kept it in the limelight. Performance improved by four to five times between 1991 and 2025, while economies of scale allowed prices to fall more than 98%, from $7,500 per kilowatt-hour to $108 per kWh today.
A mature supply chain created a virtuous cycle that other chemistries couldn’t match. The industry accepted trade-offs because the market rewarded high-power, short-duration technologies, and no viable alternatives could compete on cost and energy density simultaneously.
Today, though, fire risk and safety incidents carry quantifiable costs: project cancellations, extended permitting timelines, rising insurance premiums, and balance-of-system mitigation expenses fundamentally alter project economics. And in the meantime, other chemistries with capabilities better suited to the needs of stationary storage have improved and gotten closer to commercialization.
Increasingly, high-value deployment opportunities in space-constrained and risk-sensitive locations are effectively off-limits to lithium systems. In certain markets, developers are reaching a point at which paying for a non-lithium technology that is both accessible in these locations and avoids excessive infrastructure overhead and regulatory barriers is pencilling out.
Accelerating the transition
WWhile current events have sparked the conversation, turning the adoption of safer alternatives like advanced sodium-ion into a market reality requires action on three fronts:
- Regulators should adopt standards that recognize stable chemistries and update siting frameworks to allow inherently safe systems in urban or sensitive locations where lithium-ion batteries present unacceptable hazards.
- Insurers and underwriters must build chemistry-specific models that reward avoided thermal events and reduced liability, pricing premiums based on true exposure rather than legacy assumptions of thermal runaway as an inherent feature.
- Policymakers and utilities need to update procurement language to value risk reduction, supply chain security, and public acceptance alongside energy density, incentivizing safer chemistries in congested or vulnerable grids.
Ultimately, moratoriums are not a rejection of energy storage. They are a market signal of demand for better solutions. The message from communities, insurers, and regulators is clear: Growing energy demands cannot be met by volatile technologies that require extensive mitigation and regulatory oversight.
With stable chemistries available, the industry no longer needs to choose between performance and risk. The technology has arrived. Now the industry must align to deploy it.
Graeme Grant is the COO of Alsym Energy, a sodium-ion battery company. The opinions represented in this contributed article are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the views of Latitude Media or any of its staff.
