Moss Landing: The Smokestacks at the Edge of the Slough

The two towers on the horizon are five hundred feet tall. They have been visible across Monterey Bay for seventy-five years, the most recognizable industrial landmark on this stretch of coast, and they mark a place where the California energy economy went through its full cycle in a single lifetime.

PG&E broke ground on the Moss Landing Power Plant in nineteen forty-nine. By nineteen fifty, it was generating electricity. It sat at the junction of the highway and the slough, on the narrow strip of land between Elkhorn Slough and Monterey Bay, and it grew. A second expansion in nineteen sixty-four added two more five-hundred-foot stacks and enough generating capacity to make Moss Landing the largest power plant in California at its peak. The numbers were consequential: one thousand five hundred megawatts of capacity from Units Six and Seven alone, enough to power a large city, produced by burning natural gas on a tidal estuary.

The large generating units retired in two thousand and sixteen. The five-hundred-foot stacks remained, too expensive to remove, too visible to ignore. The site then entered its second life, as one of the largest battery energy storage complexes in the world. The same property that once held turbines burning gas to spin generators now holds banks of lithium batteries absorbing excess solar and wind power and releasing it on demand.

Directly north of the plant's property line, the Elkhorn Slough carries tidal water seven miles inland. It is one of the most ecologically rich estuaries in California. The two things have coexisted for seventy-five years, the smokestacks and the otters, the industrial scale and the tidal one.