The City of Industry’s planning commission on Tuesday, Jan. 27, unanimously voted in favor of pushing forward the Marici Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) Facility project for City Council consideration, despite public concern that the project could lead to a data center and create negative environmental impacts.
Later that same day, the Bassett Unified School District’ Board of Education unanimously voted on a resolution opposing the City of Industry’s previous Dec. 17 resolution, allowing data centers to exist city-wide.
Both Jan. 27 meetings followed recent community concerns about data center proposals and related developments proposed in municipalities across Los Angeles County, including in Monterey Park.
According to a 6,500-page staff report about energy utility company Aypa Power’s BESS proposal, the project is expected to produce a yearly electricity demand of 584,000 kilowatt-hours and will cover 9.2 acres along Gale Avenue, including minor adjustments to an existing substation site.
According to Aypa Power Senior Vice President of Development Aron Branum, BESS’s battery facility is front-of-the-meter,” one of two types of battery energy storage systems. Front-of-the-meter BESS is typically used for large-scale generation and storage like power plants, wind farms, and solar parks; “behind-the- meter” is increasingly being used for data centers, as they offer more stability.
Such centers have emerged as flashpoints in the development of artificial intelligence, which for mass consumption needs enormous data center facilities to handle the massive power and processing needs of the technology. But they’ve garnered pushback over the potential for higher energy consumption costs, strain on power grids and water resources, and impact on the environment.
Public outreach campaigns for the Industry proposal existed only for those within 300 feet of the site, 20 days prior to the hearing; additionally, the full 6,500-page report was available since December.
“The method of notification is the same process we use for all public hearing projects,” Industry Assistant City Manager Sam Pedroza said.
Branum, along with city staff, tried to assuage claims that the project would lead to a data center, citing what they said was “confusion” regarding social media posts claiming that establishing a BESS would lead to a data center.
One Facebook post read, “BESS facilities do not exist on their own. They are a core enabling component of data centers, providing backup power and load balancing for energy- and water-intensive industrial operations. Approving BESS zoning while ignoring this relationship obscures the real scale of impacts and allows projects to move forward without meaningful environmental analysis.”
The staff report included a mitigated negative declaration (MND), an official statement stating the project would not have significant environmental impacts. A similar statement in Monterey Park over a recently proposed data center sparked the ire of opponents who critiqued such a statement as being a less-stringent environmental assessment under the California Environmental Quality Act.
The proposed project could result in “significant effects in environmental topics Cultural Resources, Geology and Soils, Noise, and Tribal Cultural Resources,” according to the report, though it also asserted that each potential impact could be mitigated to “less than significant” with proposed mitigation measures.
Although fire hazard is the top concern surrounding BESS facilities, like in the Moss Landing Power Plant, one of the largest lithium-ion battery storage facilities in the world, which began burning on Jan. 16, 2024, other common concerns include air and water pollution.
One speaker, Sandra Martinez, said, “I ask you to consider [that] our land is already polluted.”
Martinez’s four kids all suffer from asthma; she can’t afford to move from the surrounding area. Should the ground be disturbed and hazardous material from either the existing ground or machinery be released, the consequences could range from mere negative health outcomes to death.
Under Hazards and Hazardous Materials, the question “would it create a significant hazard to the public or the environment” was listed as “Less Than Significant With Mitigation Incorporated.”
Another speaker said that even one life taken would be too much.
The San Gabriel Valley Tribune reached out to Aypa Power for a comment on safety concerns regarding fire hazard, but had not received a response by deadline.
Community Organizer Samuel Brown-Vasquez, who spoke at both meetings, said “every red flag you can imagine was present today [at the City of Industry planning commission].”
During public comment, Hacienda Heights resident Tiffany Lo initially asked the planning commission to consider how the BESS project would affect neighboring municipalities.
Later on, after other speakers attempted to offer their remaining time for Lo to speak again, Lo was kicked out for attempting to comment twice. On the way out of the council chamber, she’d suggested boycotting City of Industry businesses.
“Monterey Park has residents – they can hold their council members accountable, but we can’t do that for the City of Industry,” Lo said, referencing the proposed Monterey Park data center.
Monterey Park recently announced a 45-day moratorium on data center developments city-wide, with potential to extend the moratorium indefinitely. This followed massive community-led campaigns and calls to vote out council members come next election season.
By comparison, the City of Industry has less-than 300 residents.
“There’s no residents to vote them down, there’s just not enough population to do it,” Lo continued. “I asked the community to boycott out local businesses because I think that would be the only way to get [the City] to pay attention.”
City of Industry was officially incorporated as a city on June 18, 1957, as a hub for manufacturing, business, and industrial development.
“What’s ironic is that people in Monterey Park said these places don’t belong in Monterey Park, they belong in the City of Industry,” Pedroza said. “It’s not a place to live […] it’s a place to work.”
But now, people do live in the City of Industry and have lived nearby it prior to its incorporation. Bassett Unified was established in 1898. Its nine schools all exist less than five miles from the proposed BESS site.
“This board is not a municipal body […] but we do have the right to make a point of view that, when it comes to zoning decisions, we should be looped in,” BUSD President Aaron Simental said. “That’s really what this resolution is about, is making a formal point of view of what we, as a school district, ought to be in this process.”
The City of Industry declined to comment on BUSD’s resolution, stating that they weren’t notified of the resolution, that there’s been a lot of confusion on the details of the project and that they’d continue to notify parties as they do with any and all projects. They also affirmed that they’d need a responsible basis to deny a project.
At the moment, no data center has been proposed for a future city council agenda.