In this article, you’ll learn how safety concerns are central to community opposition to energy storage projects, and how technology choice in addition to outreach strategy can actually overcome it.

Key takeaways include: 

• High-profile incidents like Moss Landing have reshaped public perception and intensified scrutiny towards lithium-ion batteries grounded in risks tied to thermal runaway
• Traditional outreach and education strategies help, but have limits when the underlying risk and the resulting skepticism remains
• Safer battery designs can simplify infrastructure needs (cooling, fire suppression, setbacks), shift the conversation, and ease permitting
• Integrating technology-choice and community engagement-strategy decision making can be pivotal to project success

Battery energy storage is one of the most important tools the grid has right now. It smooths the grid, stores cheap renewable power, and keeps the lights on when demand spikes. It’s also one of the most contested, and increasingly, the reason comes down to one word: safety. Across the country, developers are walking away from town halls empty-handed, not blocked by regulators, not stalled by technical hurdles, but stopped cold by residents and local governments with safety concerns that are proving very hard to overcome. 

The pattern has become familiar and increasingly costly. At least 96 battery projects with a cumulative capacity of 25,000 megawatts have faced public pushback since 2021. The most commonly cited reasons are public safety and environmental concerns. In Massachusetts alone, since 2024, developers have canceled at least four large battery projects, all of which faced strong local pushback. 

This isn’t merely a community relations problem. It is a capacity problem. Every project that stalls is a gap in the grid, a delayed revenue stream, and a reminder that what you are proposing to deploy matters — not just for performance, but for public trust. 

Communities Aren’t Wrong to Be Worried 

At this point, Moss Landing doesn’t need an introduction. The January 2025 lithium-ion battery fire—which burned for days, destroyed large portions of the facility, and forced the evacuation of more than 1,500 residents—has become a defining moment for the industry. In the months that followed, nearby residents reported persistent headaches and bloody noses, while university researchers detected elevated levels of heavy metals in a nearby marsh. 

Lithium-ion batteries contain organic electrolyte solvents with low flash points. Under the right stressors — overcharging, physical damage, extreme heat, age — a cell can enter thermal runaway: a self-sustaining chain reaction in which the battery generates its own heat and oxygen and reaches extreme temperatures.  

The Moss Landing facility used a nickel, manganese and cobalt chemistry (NMC) that battery researchers note is more volatile than the iron-phosphate (LFP) chemistry now common in newer grid-scale projects. But the fire’s scale shaped public perception of the entire technology category, not just one facility. 

The opposition that followed has been organized and effective. In a rural Massachusetts town, a proposed 180-megawatt facility became a flashpoint: the town passed a local bylaw banning lithium storage outright, and when the developer petitioned the state to override it, more than 200 people packed a school gymnasium for three hours of public comment. Fire risk was the loudest concern, but residents also raised toxic runoff into a drinking water watershed and the noise of continuous industrial cooling in a residential community. In Virginia’s Rockingham County, a county board of supervisors unanimously denied a special use permit for a standalone storage project in 2025 — even after it had cleared earlier permit stages and secured a power purchase agreement with the regional utility. Across some states, county boards have passed indefinite bans.  

Members of Congress have begun intervening on the side of activists. The infrastructure of opposition, including nonprofits, Facebook groups, legal challenges, and political pressure has matured quickly. This points to a shift in the permitting landscape where resistance is coordinated, introducing longer timelines, added friction, and greater uncertainty for projects that once would have moved forward. 

The Problem Isn’t Perception. It’s the Chemistry. 

In response to this community opposition, the battery industry’s response has largely been that lithium-ion is safer than it used to be. Newer iron-phosphate chemistries run cooler than the nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries that burned at Moss Landing. Outdoor installations are designed to contain a fire within a single unit. Failure rates have come down as the technology has matured. 

All of that is true. None of it resolves the underlying problem. 

Lithium-ion batteries are built around a fundamentally flammable electrolyte. Thermal runaway is not a defect or an edge case. It is a known failure mode that the entire system-level engineering of a lithium-ion BESS installation exists to prevent. Active cooling, fire suppression, setback distances, emergency response plans aren’toptional add-ons. They are the direct consequence of deploying a chemistry that can, under the wrong conditions, sustain its own fire. 

When a community looks at that engineering apparatus and concludes there is something to worry about, they are not misinformed. They are reading the system correctly. 

When the Message Can Only Go So Far 

The developer response to community opposition has generally been reasonable: hold open houses early, publish plain-language safety information, invite fire chiefs to visit comparable operating facilities, and emphasize the differences between a 2025 design and what burned at Moss Landing in 2023. These efforts matter. 

But they share a structural limitation. Every reassurance is downstream of an admission: yes, under certain conditions, this battery can catch fire. The entire engineering and safety apparatus around a lithium-ion BESS installation exists to manage a risk that is real. By most reports, modern safety systems like liquid cooling and immersive fire extinguishing materials are very effective. But asking a community to trust that management — in perpetuity, operated by a company they don’tknow, for a facility they probably didn’t ask for — is a harder sell than it looks on a slide deck. 

The projects that navigate opposition most successfully tend to start earlier, engage more continuously, involve local voices in project design rather than just in comment hearings, and sometimes offer communities a direct economic stake in the outcome. And successful developers also know how to identify “no-go” communities as early as possible in the process – after all, no one wants an uphill permitting process. 

These are real levers. But even best-practice outreach has a ceiling when the underlying chemistry gives people something legitimate to worry about. 

A Different Community Starting Point 

Non-flammable chemistry is more than just a technical specification. For developers navigating community opposition, it is a radically different way to pitch a project. It has the potential to unlock projects in communities that show opposition from the beginning, which is often a key indicator of the eventual success or failure of the permitting push. 

Not every battery chemistry carries the same risk profile. There is growing recognition that addressing fire risk at the chemistry level is the most effective way to respond to community concerns, but not all alternatives solve this cleanly. Some non-flammable battery approaches exist, including flow batteries, but they often introduce tradeoffs in cost, performance, footprint, or deployment flexibility that limit where they can be used at scale. 

Sodium-ion batteries built on polyanionic chemistry such as sodium iron pyrophosphate (NFPP) formulations offer a meaningful improvement in safety compared to traditional lithium-ion systems. They are more thermally stable and reduce the likelihood and severity of thermal events, even if they are not inherently non-flammable. Alysm’s NFPP+ chemistry goes a step further, engineered to eliminate flammability at the cell level and shift how risk is addressed. 

Where lithium-ion requires active cooling, fire suppression, setbacks, and emergency planning to manage the consequences of potential thermal runaway, a chemistry that reduces or eliminates that risk at the cell level changes how much of that infrastructure is required. 

Cooling systems can be simplified, and increasingly common liquid cooling architectures may not be necessary. Fire suppression systems may still be present for other components within the system, but they no longer need to be designed around worst-case battery fire scenarios. Setback requirements driven by thermal runaway risk can also be reconsidered. 

The permitting conversation shifts from “here is how we manage the fire risk” to a fundamentally different starting point, where fire risk has been materially reduced or designed out at the cell level. 

For developers working in contested markets — rural communities near watersheds, dense urban areas, locations adjacent to schools or hospitals, regions like PJM where community opposition has become a structural project risk — this is not a minor differentiator. It is a different starting point for every public conversation about the project. 

The community question shifts as well. Instead of “what happens if it catches fire,” the question becomes “what does it do.” That is a conversation developers knowhow to effectively handle. 

The Bottom Line 

Community opposition to battery storage is not going away. The incidents that drive it are real. The concerns are grounded. And the organized infrastructure of opposition has become sophisticated enough to stop well-capitalized, technically sound projects in markets that urgently need storage capacity.

The industry’s approach to community engagement must account for battery chemistry from the start. Each chemistry has its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of cost, ease of community acceptance, and other attributes like performance in extreme weather and over the long term, for example. Strategic planning for community engagement should be done in parallel with setting specifications – they are inherently linked. 

Projects that start with a non-flammable chemistry change the terms of the public debate before the first open house is scheduled. They give fire chiefs something different to say. They give developers a different answer to the hardest question in the room – the tradeoff is that you may be the first developer to say that in that city, state or power market, and that distinction doesn’t come without its own challenges. 

A non-flammable battery doesn’t just change the permit process. It changes the conversation at the town hall, the hearing, and the kitchen table. That is what a game-changer actually looks like.