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in Van Buren County
Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) in Columbia Township
Residents of watery Columbia Township, in southwest Michigan, are fighting a hazardous Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) by the fraudulent Vesper Energy. The Greenfield development would destroy 19 acres, including wetlands, with county drains running through the land.
BESS sites, fire hazard, and safety
“These types of [BESS] units,”says veteran Michigan firefighter and lithium ion battery expert Captain Durham on his educational YouTube channel, “the ones that look like shipping containers where there’s one door, one way in and one way out–they should be banned…it’s dangerous not only for the employees, but for the firefighters and the responders on scene.”
Durham says some of the BESS designers and engineers he’s spoken with were “clueless” about fire suppression. Following news cycles, he estimates BESS fires are happening globally at a rate of more than one per month - an estimate readers can easily confirm for themselves in search engines.
In many of these cases, residents are issued shelter in place orders or are told to evacuate entirely. Land, water, air, and entire ecologies are polluted for miles surrounding these BESS fires.
“Not only are these extremely difficult to extinguish, but they’re extraordinarily dangerous,” says Durham. “Unfortunately, there’s not a lot you can do with an energy storage system fire. The best you can do is protect exposures, set up a hot zone, and stay away from it…
I can’t stress how dangerous a situation this is…fire crews, get people away from these incidents. It’s extremely dangerous. You’ve got the deflagration hazard. Toxic gas. Electrocution. Arc flash. It’s just a major thing that we need to stay away from.”
Who is Vesper Energy?
Vesper Energy’s past and present dealings are riddled with scandal, fraud, destruction, lawsuits, and bribes. Their founding company, the property management company Lendlease, has an equally riddled past.
A highlights reel of Vesper Energy and Lendlease’s more prominent, well documented activities includes:
- defrauding the Australian government out of $1B in taxes (ongoing)
- causing the multi-billion dollar investment fund Australian Ethical to divest its $11M due to lack of transparency and concern over destruction of koala habitat corridors on the site of a 3,300 home development community (2023)
- a pattern of offering bribes to local residents with cash payments and “project cooperation agreements” to keep them from speaking negatively of the project (ongoing)
- paying $56M in fines and restitution to avoid criminal charges in an over decade-long overbilling fraud scheme across several major construction projects in NYC (2012)
- residents near Vesper’s Nestlewood 700 acre solar field in Clermont County Ohio have been experiencing severe soil erosion, runoff, and flooding as a result of the site, describing it as “700 acres of hell” (2024)
- currently battling the Ohio Power Siting Board in Ohio’s Supreme Court to overturn the board’s decisions to deny Vesper Energy permits for large-scale solar projects based on public opposition
A local resident neighbor to Vesper Energy's Nestlewood solar field in Clermont County, Ohio.
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