Battery storage failure at Edwards Sanborn E2 in Kern County, California
EIR-0128Provisional entry. Confirmed: a lithium-ion BESS failure was logged for a 66 MW/140 MWh facility in Mojave, California in February 2024, affecting a very small fraction of capacity; not yet confirmed: the specific site name, cause, fire response, injuries or downtime, which no public source has described. No further update is scheduled; the entry stays provisional until new information is published.
A lithium-ion battery energy storage system at the Edwards Sanborn E2 site in Kern County, California, operated by Terra-Gen, experienced a failure incident in February 2024, according to an industry database that tracks stationary battery storage failures. The system was rated at 66 MW and 140 MWh and was approximately 2.2 years old at the time of the incident. The proportion of the installation affected was very small, reported as a fraction of a percent of total capacity. No further public detail is available on the specific trigger, fire or thermal event characteristics, emergency response, injuries or evacuation status. The incident was logged in a database that focuses on failures with potential wider public health and safety impact, most commonly thermal events such as fire or explosion in lithium-ion systems.
Not reported in the available sources.
- Failures can occur in battery energy storage systems within the first few years of operation, reinforcing the need for ongoing monitoring beyond the commissioning period.
- Publicly available failure databases often lack detailed root cause information, which limits the transferability of lessons unless operators or investigators publish fuller findings.
- Recording and reporting even small-scale damaged capacity events supports industry-wide understanding of failure rates and modes across different battery chemistries and system ages.
Published 2026-09-07. Written from public reporting. Descriptive, not investigative. See the data accuracy disclaimer.