Pretty sure this is happening with Rampant but if you place an obilisk when its to close to a nest i got this, tried placing it away from nests and it worked fine, going to test more, also not sure if your tesla coils will do the same

The mod Obelisks of Light (1.1.3) caused a non-recoverable error.
Please report this error to the mod author.

Error while running event Obelisks-of-light::on_built_entity (ID 6)
Obelisks-of-light/control.lua:94: attempt to index local 'new_entity' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
Obelisks-of-light/control.lua:94: in function <Obelisks-of-light/control.lua:70>

could also be alien biomes but i was able to place it down on the red volcanic rock just fine

It was in fact rampant, rampant doesnt allow for turrets to be placed near a nest or worm but for some reason only the obelisk is crashing (havent gotten a tesla coil yet)

So due to the nature of the Obelisks rotation function we had to create a script to handle it, the tesla coils have no such script, so I would imagine the tesla coils would not crash the game. Turrets in factorio have a rotation animation that handles the targeting of the gun barrel itself, the base of the turret has no rotation animation and had to be done using 4 variations that are swapped out when rotated.