A major fire broke out Thursday at one of the world's largest battery storage plants.

The facility, in Moss Landing, northern California, stores energy for general use as part of the state grid, and is a significant part of California's efforts to use cleaner energy.

It caught fire Thursday afternoon, officials in Monterey County said, prompting evacuation orders for more than 2,000 people.

A Monterey County Sheriff's Office spokesperson told the local news channel KSBW 8 that 40% of the battery plant had burned.

A law enforcement spokesperson told CNN that concerns around chemical spills and hazardous material burning had prompted broad evacuation orders.

Officials had not commented publicly on the cause of the fire as of early Friday.

The facility is operated by Vistra Energy, a Fortune 500 firm based in Irving, Texas, which has some four four million residential and commercial customers across 20 states.

Its stock price was down just over 5% in premarket trading on Friday, but has soared more than 330% in the past 12 months, valuing it at $59 billion.

One of the batteries at Moss Landing, the Elkhorn Battery, was built in partnership with Tesla.

The system uses Tesla Megapack battery units, which contain lithium-ion batteries and power conversion equipment, and has a capacity of 730 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy storage.

Vistra did not immediately respond to Business Insider requests for comments made outside working hours.

Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church told KSBW-TV that the fire was a "worst-case scenario" and a "very severe" situation. But he said he didn't expect the fire to spread beyond the concrete building it was enclosed in.

Even so, "there's no way to sugarcoat it," he added. "This is a disaster."

Jenny Lyon, a spokesperson for Vistra Energy, told Politico that the cause of the fire has yet to be identified but that an inquiry would begin once it's extinguished.

In a press release announcing the plant's expansion in 2023, Texas-based Vistra Energy said it was one of the world's largest battery storage plants.

The site has experienced problems before. In 2015, a transmission tower at the power plant collapsed, resulting in a significant power outage.

A failing heat detector also caused damage to the battery complex in 2021, and in 2022 a fire broke out at a nearby Pacific Gas & Electric-owned battery plant.

The fire burned as authorities in southern California, some 250 miles away, continued to battle the wildfires in Los Angeles that began early last week.

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