The Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday that it has assumed responsibility for what it says is the “Largest Lithium-Ion Battery Cleanup in Agency History” at the Moss Landing facility outside San Francisco.
Crews supervised by the EPA entered the facility this week to begin cleaning out the remains of the fire damaged batteries, which the agency says will be recycled at EPA-approved recycling facilities.
As has happened far too frequently, the retired batteries erupted spontaneously in January, leading authors of MIT’s weekly climate newsletter to speculate about what this latest conflagration would mean for the future of the electric vehicle and stationary battery storage industries going forward.
“With the growing number of electric vehicles and batteries for energy storage on the grid,” the authors wrote, “more high-profile fires have hit the news, like last year’s truck fire in LA, the spate of e-bike battery fires in New York City, or one at a French recycling plant last year.”
The parade of troubling incidents related to these batteries has continued throughout 2025. In June, for example, a large container ship called the Morning Midas, operated by Zodiac Maritime, sank into the Pacific Ocean after batteries in EVs it was carrying to Alaska spontaneously combusted, forcing the crew to abandon ship. A month later, U.S.-based shipper Matson announced it would no longer transport EV cargoes due to the obvious dangers involved. Three weeks later, Alaska Marine Lines put a similar policy in place.
All of these inconvenient news stories come at an already troubling time for the U.S. EV industry, given that its huge $7,500 per car federal subsidy expired at midnight, Sept. 30. That subsidy was enacted in the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and subsequently repealed in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4 of this year.
Sales have spiked in the run-up to the subsidy expiration, to no one’s real surprise. But EV makers now face the troubling prospect of having to compete in the U.S. market absent that significant price advantage, leading many to anticipate a significant drop-off in sales.
Some carmakers have already begun to scale back operations. Stellantis announced the cancellation of a planned all-electric Dodge Ram pickup model on Sept.12, citing slowing demand for such trucks in a field already dominated by the Ford F-150 Lightning and the Tesla Cyber Truck. The fact that sales of those competing models are already coming in well below projections this year was another obvious motivating factor.
Ford, meanwhile, said in August it would delay the introduction of what it refers to as “next generation” updates to its Lightning pickup and full-sized electric van for two years due to the same challenging market conditions. “F-150 Lightning, America’s best-selling electric truck, and E-Transit continue to meet today’s customer needs,” the company said in what can only be described as an understatement.
Competitor GM announced it would take similar action on Sept. 4, saying it was suspending production of a pair of Cadillac SUVs – the mid-size Lyriq and the full-size Vistiq – at its assembly plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., effective in December. The company also said it would indefinitely delay the start of a second shift at an assembly plant near Kansas City.
Amid the frequent big fire events involving EV batteries and the industry’s fallout from the loss of a federal subsidy, it must be repeated here that the electric vehicle industry is not “new” or even a young one. It is in fact well over a century old, with the first electric cars introduced in the U.S. in the 1890s, during the same period when gas-powered cars started to come onto the market. In those early years, in fact, many experts insisted that electric cars would ultimately render gas-powered cars obsolete and become the dominant force in American transportation.
But makers of EVs then found themselves suffering from the same set of limitations that plague the industry well over a century later: Range anxiety, lack of infrastructure, and persistent unreliability.
The fact that an industry this old has still not solved for the same set of issues after so much time makes it reasonable to question whether it ever will.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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